Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing
ABC Supply 500 at Pocono Raceway
Verizon IndyCar Series
RACE NOTES/QUOTES – August 23, 2015
CONTACT FROM VAUTIER FORCED RAHAL TO RETIRE FROM THE ABC SUPPLY 500 IN 20TH PLACE
GRAHAM RAHAL, No. 15 Steak ‘n Shake Dallara/Honda/Firestone: “Obviously I’m frustrated. We had a pretty good race car today. It was slow initially but we were working on it and we got it pretty good. Then we had an issue in the pits that lost us a bunch of spots so we were trying to work our way back up. Vautier is not known as the smartest guy and you see why. It’s just a shame for this Steak ‘n Shake team going into this championship (fight) second in the points right now (“points as they run” at the time). We’re going to be watching the Verizon app to see how many points we fall back for the rest of the race. This one hurts. One race to go and this puts a big, big dent in things. Wilson and I were coming through Turn 2. There were a lot of guys driving pretty aggressively and Wilson lost momentum and I just stuck it inside of him and we ran from (turn) two down to three together and then Vautier just decided that he wanted to join the party there at the last moment and unfortunately just punted us. He says I turned in on him but there’s not any space. We’re already two wide, he knows that, he sees that. It just hurts us. As I said to him ‘You know I’m in the championship hunt for Honda. Why would you do something like that?’ He has no answers. We didn’t have the best of days going with the error in the pits but I knew my guys had gotten a good stop and we were going to fight our way back into this. We were only 90 laps into a 200 lap race. We’re down but we’re not out. We’ve had a good year, nothing to be ashamed about. We’ll go to Sonoma in attack mode.”
NEXT UP: The Verizon IndyCar Series season-finale is next weekend at Sonoma Raceway. The GoPro Grand Prix of Sonoma is a double-points event.
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