Graham Rahal, driver of the No.15 PeopleReady Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing Honda had a fantastic qualifying session for Sunday’s BitNile.com Grand Prix of Portland as he will start the race from P1. The pole was Rahal’s second P1 on a road course in a row following his P1 Aeard at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course.
Everybody has pushed so hard to get our team back to this point and it’s nice to have two poles in the past three races here at the end of the year. Hopefully we can finish this deal off tomorrow and get a win in the PeopleReady Honda. It would be pretty sweet. We used less black’s (primary Firestone tires) through the whole weekend so far than everybody else so we had sets to use. We felt our car was very fast on blacks. It was good on red’s too, but I thought that blacks were the power play there. I feel our race car is better than our qualifying car to be honest. We’ll see how warmup goes here shortly but it felt really good to put that lap in. We’ll focus on having good stops, the strategy will hopefully be straightforward.”
Juri Vips in his first INDYCAR SERIES race in the No.30 Kustom Entertainment Honda starts the race from 18th place and speaking following the action he commented saying:
We didn’t quite nail it in qualifying. It was looking really good this morning; I just think we went a little bit in the wrong direction collectively. There are a couple of things I could have done differently as well. It’s all new to me with the bars and stuff so I think I should have been very aggressive with them in that session since we started a little bit out of the window. But it was exciting to get past my first qualifying session in INDYCAR. I’m sure that we can move forward a lot in the race. For the final practice we will focus on how the car behaves with heavy fuel, out laps, pit stops and more. I’m happy there is such a thing as warmups in INDYCAR. It definitely helps my situation.”
Christian Lundgaard in the No.45 Hy-Vee Honda starts the race from 17th place and speaking following the action he commented saying:
Obviously, it was a very short qualifying session. Obviously, Graham being on pole proves what was in the car. We made some changes overnight which didn’t go our way which was hidden a little bit in the cooler track temperatures this morning. Even though we knew qualifying was going to be tricky – especially with the balance we had — no matter what, it’s a disappointing result. There is a lot of frustration right now, but we’ll have to see what we can do tomorrow to get the No. 45 Hy-Vee car up front.”