Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s Graham Rahal in the No.15 United Rentals Honda had a difficult qualifying in St Petersburg and will start Sunday’s season-opening Firestone Grand Prix presented by RP Funding in eleventh place and speaking following the action he said:
Qualifying has come to a close here in St Pete with the No. 15 United Rentals car in P11. I thought we had more than that. Coming out of Q1 where we were second, I thought we were going to be very competitive but Q2 we just couldn’t quite get the balance right. It’s so close you know, 2/10ths (of a second) and you advance to the Fast Six, but we didn’t. We have to go back to the drawing board, we have to improve the car a little bit. I’m watching the others on their in-car cameras and stuff, and we have some work to do. We’re going to close in on it. I think as a team everybody was scrambling this morning, scrambling between sessions – so good job just to get all three cars on track. Hopefully we can have a good night, get some rest and get ready to go tomorrow.
Christian Lundgaard in the No.30 Shield Cleansers Honda starts the race from 15th place and speaking following the action he said:
It was a good day throughout. I think the morning session went pretty well, we made good improvements since yesterday in practice two this morning. We had a slight issue on the car just before qualifying and managed to sort it out and got the car out there. We performed on the (Firestone; primary) blacks but didn’t quite get the performance out of the reds that we were hoping for but considering the rush we were in just before qualifying, I am pretty satisfied with the result.
Jack Harvey hit the wall during practice on Saturday morning, however, the team was able to get the car repaired and he will start his first race for RLL from 23rd place and speaking following the action he said:
Qualifying was not good honestly, I think we had quite a lot of pace that we just didn’t get to show. We got completely screwed with traffic to be honest. A tiny mistake on the entry of Turn 9 in the morning practice and, I mean, that’s the wall. I just grazed it and it was enough to take me off line and into the wall. So I’ll say I’m sorry to the guys of the #45 Hy-Vee Honda that it happened. I don’t crash often or a lot. Honestly, just a really disappointing day across the board, I do think the 45 Hy-Vee Honda has got some speed, we just didn’t get to show it. It was a tough day and it makes tomorrow tough, but we will give it 110 when it matters which will be tomorrow.
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