Honda Performance Development flexed its muscles with its teams occupying six top ten spots in qualifying for today’s 85-lap Honda Indy Toronto, the NTT INDYCAR SERIES only event outside of the United States of America in 2023.
The Honda Indy Toronto is round ten of the 2023 schedule and so far this season, Honda Performance Development has scored 90 percent of the NTT P1 Awards.
For Christian Lundgaard of Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, it is his second NTT P1 Award of the season following his pole for the GMR Grand Prix of Indianapolis on the IMS road course at the start of May.
Speaking to Paddock Eye following qualifying for the race today, Lundgaard spoke about his expectations for the race.
I mean, I wouldn’t be disappointed with a win. We do lead the field off, but it’s tough.
I think the progression that we made just looking at Detroit, we were absolutely nowhere, and we come here, and we were on pole. It’s two different street circuits, but they’re very bumpy, and there’s a lot of concrete patches here. There’s a lot of concrete patches in Detroit as well.
It’s certainly something that we need to figure out how to just understand that and have a better package. Clearly we were quick enough today, so the Honda Vivid Car will definitely try to win the race tomorrow, for sure.
It was also a solid qualifying for NTT INDYCAR SERIES newcomer Tom Blomqvist who makes his race debut with Meyer Shank Racing later today from 20th on the grid having managed to out-qualify the likes of Alexander Rossi and Ryan Hunter-Reay and will roll off from 20th after setting a time of 01:16.0415s and speaking following the action he said:
I’m not sure they could’ve thrown anything else at us this weekend. The rain started coming down just before our first-round qualifying – trying to find my way with the car in those conditions… I mean, I normally like the wet, but obviously 10 minutes [of qualifying] isn’t a whole lot of time to get used to it. Just trying to find the limits of the car was obviously not optimal. But we’re not last! Anyway, that’s the way the cookie crumbles and lets see what tomorrow brings.”