Arrow McLaren SP’s Pato O’Ward in the No.5 Arrow McLaren SP Chevrolet who is 25 points behind championship leader Alex Palou of Chip Ganassi Racing will start Sunday’s penultimate race of the 2021 NTT IndyCar Series season, the Firestone Grand Prix of Monterey at WeatherTech Raceway from sixth place with a time of 1:24.2715s while his championship rivals Alex Palou starts the race from fourth place and speaking following the action, O’Ward said:
“Honestly, I’m pleasantly surprised with our result in qualifying today. I’m happy with sixth. It’s a lot better than where we were at in the sessions before qualifying. The team did some good changes to the car and I’m happy with how I executed. We will see what we have for the race tomorrow. We just need to make the car and package better tomorrow during warm up to race against these guys.”
Felix Rosenqvist starts the race from 15th place in the No.7 Vuse Arrow McLaren SP Chevrolet and speaking following the action he said:
“We didn’t transfer in Round 1 after missing it by two hundredths of a second. We had a miscalculation on the fuel, so we had to abort our third lap. We couldn’t do three laps which was disappointing. At least we get more red tires than the guys in front so I think that will be a good thing tomorrow. It will be a long race with a lot of tire saving. There seems to be big degradation across all tires. We will keep our heads up and try to do some damage tomorrow.”
President of Arrow McLaren SP Taylor Kiel commented saying:
Great turnaround by the Arrow McLaren SP team to gain speed overnight and give ourselves a shot in qualifying today. Felix narrowly missed out on a transfer position in Round 1 after a fuel miscalculation by the team cost him a third lap in qualifying. It’s unfortunate that he didn’t get a full shot at advancing but he can do a lot in the race tomorrow.
Pato fought hard to elevate himself and the No. 5 team to the Firestone Fast Six. Unfortunately a mistake in the corkscrew eliminated our shot at pole, but we are in a great position to fight. Tomorrow’s race will provide many strategies due to aggressive tire wear so it should be a fight to the end. We will continue to work hard overnight to improve our chances at a great result for both Arrow McLaren SP Chevrolets tomorrow.