1) Felix Rosenqvist 1:10.2265 / 125.030 mph (Group 2, Round 3)
6) Christian Lundgaard 1:10.7280 / 124.143 mph (Group 1, Round 3)
13) Jack Harvey 1:10.8564 / 123.918 mph (Group 1, Round 1)
17) Graham Rahal 1:10.9093 / 123.826 mph (Group 1, Round 1)
GRAHAM RAHAL, No. 15 One Cure Dallara/Honda/Firestone: “I just never had it (in qualifying). Even on the blacks. On the blacks this morning, we were P3 and on the blacks (in qualifying) I was 10th or something. The rear of the car was not good. I will say we are fighting a major straight line deficit compared to my teammates. I think it was 3/10ths of a second compared to Christian in practice. It’s hard to make up, we ended up about a tenth down on him and we need to figure out why that is. But from practice, the car was completely different. We used an experimental setup that we will continue on with for tomorrow. Hopefully it races better than that tomorrow. The heat of the day like this, the track is throwing everybody a bit of a loop. I’m mightily disappointed for One Cure and for our whole team. All of us expected to be way faster than that. Christian advanced but we all felt our speed would be better.”
CHRISTIAN LUNDGAARD, No. 30 Shield Cleansers Dallara/Honda/Firestone: “It was our best qualifying of the year here. The Indy road course has been good to me so far with qualifying fourth for this race last year. We didn’t quite make the fast six in May even though we should have. We were screwed a bit with a car going off the track ahead of us in May. We executed today and we got through to Round 3. I think we might have had a tenth more which would have put us up towards third or fourth instead of P6 but we executed the best we could for now so. The points are scored tomorrow so we’ll keep digging.”
JACK HARVEY, 45 Hy-Vee Dallara/Honda/Firestone: “We just missed it a little bit today. We warmed up okay but I think things obviously changed a bit from when we were here in May. I don’t know if it’s just the temperature, but our No. 45 Hy-Vee Honda just wasn’t quite as good and we missed it by a little bit. I’m sure everyone has been talking about already but this track is separated not by tenths but by hundredths of seconds. It’s so close, so tight, there are so many great teams and drivers. Today unfortunately we just missed it but I think we’ve got a great race car. The car is really good on blacks. We’ll use the warmup wisely and just go forward in the race.”
RLL AT THE IMS ROAD COURSE…. The Gallagher Grand Prix will mark the 13th NTT INDYCAR SERIES race on the 2.439-mile road course. The team’s best finish here is second in 2015 and July 4, 2020 by Rahal and the best start is fourth in 2020 by Rahal and 2021 Race 2 by Lundgaard.