The Arrow McLaren SP NTT IndyCar Series team endured a tricky opening day to the season at the Firestone Grand Prix presented by RP Funding on Friday.
Felix Rosenqvist in the No.7 Vuse Arrow McLaren Chevrolet ended the day in 16th and speaking following the action he said:
| “We are all finished with the first session of the year. I thought we had a pretty different car than what we brought last year and it was definitely better in some areas. It seems like we just didn’t really get the lap time out of it. I kind of had a messy session, having to pit after three laps to fix an issue. Once I got to go back out, it kind of ruined the run a little bit. So we lost a little bit of pace, but we will dig into it. I think there is plenty of room to improve tomorrow.” |
Pato O’Ward in the No.5 Arrow McLaren SP Chevrolet ended the day in 20th place and speaking following the action he said:
| “It is the first session of the year and a completely new package, so it was time to see if it worked or didn’t work. The pace wasn’t quite there today, so it’s something we will need to take a look at for this weekend and for future street courses. We will try another approach. We need to see where we are lacking and try to make the car better. Practice 2 is going to be all about trying to optimize our qualifying car to have the best starting position for the race. We will see where we stack up and then give them hell in the race.” |
Arrow McLaren SP Team President Taylor Kiel commented saying:
| “It is great to be back racing again. It’s a long offseason, so happy to be back with the fans and the sunshine is amazing. I don’t think we rolled off very stron but we made continual improvements throughout the session. Unfortunately you only get one set of tires in this initial practice. We have some momentum heading into tonight, and we will sit down to debrief and make the cars better for tomorrow. I think we are in the window, just didn’t quite hit it right out of the box.” |
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