Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s Christian Lundgaard in the No.45 Hy-Vee Honda will start Sunday’s season-opening Firestone Grand Prix of St Petersburg presented by RP Funding from P11 on the grid and speaking after setting a time of 59.9618s he said:
I’m happy with how we executed qualifying even though I’m a little disappointed that we had to get through that strategy that we did. Good thing is that it’s a black (tire) race here so we don’t need the reds or greens — the guayule tires. I’m happy that we managed to get through it. It was either starting 18th or starting 11th or 12th and we would rather want to start 11th or 12th. It’s a good execution from the team even though we didn’t have the package that we were expecting to have.
Jack Harvey in the No.30 Kustom Entertainment Honda starts the race from 19th place with a time of 01:00.7270s and speaking following the action he said:
That was actually a disappointing session for us. It sucks that our worst session this weekend was qualifying. The No. 30 Kustom Entertainment car has been really good for our practices so I’m not really sure what happened there in the session. It was a big disappointment because of how good we felt we were. The good news is its going to be a black tire race and the car is good on those so hopefully we can move forward.
Graham Rahal in the No.15 United Rentals ahonda starts the race from 20th with a time of 01:00.3714s and speaking following the action he commented saying:
We ended up 10th in our session, which was way more compact than Group 1. Actually we made a lot of progress, the car was a lot more consistent. Yesterday I complained about the brakes, and we just changed them for qualifying and the car was night and day and that hampered our session too. It may not look like it, but the truth of the matter is, I think we made some great progress. My very first lap should have been two-to-two-and-one-half-tenths quicker which probably wouldn’t have advanced but I went into Turn 1 and the rears locked and I got a little bit wide and that hurt my best lap on those tires; they’re one lap tires. I’m not going to go to bed tonight angry because I actually feel like, finally this session, we made some progress. Up until this session I was totally lost. I think that we’re on the right path and that we can make a pretty good, pretty-consistent race car out of it. The tire degradation on these green tires is going to be tremendous and so if we can find a way to make those last, we can use strategy to our advantage a little bit here, and if so, I think that we will be okay.”