Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing
102nd Running of the Indianapolis 500
Verizon IndyCar Series
PRACTICE NOTES/QUOTES – May 17, 2018
RAHAL LED PRACTICE DAY 3 FOR THE INDY 500; SERVIA AND SATO FACED A FEW CHALLENGES
1) Graham Rahal 226.047 mph 102 laps
16) Oriol Servia 223.641 mph 62 laps
33) Takuma Sato 221.776 mph 89 laps
GRAHAM RAHAL, No. 15 United Rentals Dallara/Honda/Firestone: “Today was definitely a better day for sure. From the get-go, I knew that yesterday we didn’t put in any effort to actually put in a decent lap. I found myself all day yesterday in the middle of the pack. It’s impossible to put up a number from that position. So there was a lot of reason and motivation to go and try to put together a decent one today. It was obviously our second lap. I went out and was trying to do a qualifying simulation. I just went out, a bunch of guys came out. Stefan Wilson came out in front of me. He was at the end of the back straight as I was going out of two. I thought, for once I’m just going to do this, just stay in it. Not normally my MO, but I thought I might as well put a good one up there, at least lower my dad’s blood pressure for the night, Lanigan and everybody. It was a solid run. We tried another qual sim. Every qual sim I did today everybody came out in front of me. I didn’t get a qual sim today. Not a single one. Hopefully Mother Nature will be nice to us tomorrow. For sure today was, in the end, a very good day. We had the car. We showed that it had the pace, number one. Number two, at the end of the day we found and made some big strides with our racecar. That’s more what I was focused on. But that last run, that was by far the best I have felt. Obviously there’s a lot of cars out there, a bunch of people, it was by far the best that I have felt in traffic to this point. I felt a lot stronger than a good amount of guys that I was around. It’s still hard to pass when you’re 20th and 15th in line. This car, it’s very disruptive back there. The last car was, too. I think it’s going to go out there and race just fine. Today was definitely a good day for us overall just to make a huge step forward in a lot of phases of it. We can all rest a little bit easier. For tomorrow we’ve been scratching our heads like crazy. Everybody has been nervous. Everybody has been trying a hundred different things. I have to say Takuma and Oriol have been extremely influential and beneficial to our program. It’s great to have three guys that have so much experience around this place. I can guarantee you that come Monday, we’ll be much better off from a racing perspective than where we are even today.”
TAKUMA SATO, No. 30 Mi-Jack / Panasonic Dallara/Honda/Firestone: “We did a qualifying sim, four short ones actually. One was reasonably successful and the other three I had to abort due to the balance of the car. We were struggling to find speed on qualifying simulation to find any speed. And then in later afternoon, we went back to the race trim and carried over the positives from yesterday and I felt that was good but today turned out to be a really difficult day. I struggled a lot with grip, speed, balance. We will have a look at the data. Tomorrow will be a completely different day. We bump up the boost which I’m quite excited about but before that I think we need to really understand what happened today.”
ORIOL SERVIA, No. 64 Scuderia Corsa / Manitowoc Dallara/Honda/Firestone, entered by Scuderia Corsa with RLL: “We really didn’t have the day we planned, in the sense, that for the afternoon session we had a lot of things we wanted to try, but we didn’t have a chance to. The morning session went really well. We did a couple of good, solid runs on our own to start getting the set up for qualifying so that was good. But then in the afternoon we had a couple of little mechanical issues that kept us from being on track. Luckily our teammates were out there doing a lot of laps and doing some testing for us so we should gather all the information with all the engineers, and I’m sure we will put the best package together. The important thing is its only Thursday, tomorrow is Fast Friday! Tomorrow will be a really good indication of where we stand in terms of our own speed for qualifying. I think we should be in decent shape.”
NEXT UP: Fast Friday practice will take place from 11-6 p.m. ET tomorrow.
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