Juncos Hollinger Racing’s Conor Daly in the No.78 Chevrolet was delighted with his qualifying performance for today’s Bommarito Automotive Group 500 at World Wide Technology Raceway.
Daly who starts the race from ninth place commented saying:
First qualifying session with the hybrid. It’s kind of cool to learn how to pick out exactly what percentage you need to use and then how much you can get back in one lap. Here, it’s really interesting because you are almost flat in (turns) three and four. I should have been flat in three and four, but I was scaring myself so…It’s just interesting. Good learning experience for us from the practice session. Not going to be quite enough, but hopefully it keeps us around mid-pack and we should be alright.
“A qualifying run with the hybrid is different. You have to try and be super optimal on that. I didn’t get to qualify at Iowa, so I hadn’t really experienced that yet. We made a good step forward from our practice. I mean, is that enough? I don’t know, but the conditions seem to be very, very volatile. So, I was easy flat in three, four earlier, and (during the qualifying) run, I was like man, that’s a bit a bit different. So we’ll go to work on it. I don’t think we’re going to be in a bad spot, so we’ll see. Just got to thank Chevrolet and Ricardo Juncos and Brad Hollinger, everyone that’s allowed me to be here. It’s really cool.”
Romain Grosjean in the No.77 Chevrolet starts the race from 6th place and speaking following the action he commented saying:
It’s been really good, to be fair. I think we have great speed. David Malukas’ lap was pretty impressive, to be honest. I was kind of happy where I was, but he’s definitely done a hell of a job there. We’ll see where we are at the end. The race will not be easy to pass, so starting up front will be good. I think Conor (Daly) being with the team with his experience on ovals has been very valuable for all of us. For me, I’m still a young guy on ovals, so still trying to learn from those guys, and I think we’ve been working well together. We tested here ten days ago, and it worked. It went well, it worked well. We’ll see today, but happy with our qualifying.”