Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing
Harvest GP – Indianapolis Motor Speedway – RACE 1
NTT INDYCAR SERIES
QUALIFYING NOTES/QUOTES – October 1, 2020
RAHAL QUALIFIED 11TH FOR RACE 1 OF THE HARVEST GP; SATO LOST HIS FASTEST LAP FOR BRINGING OUT THE RED FLAG AND WILL START 24TH
1) Rinus Veekay 1:09.6903 / 125.992 mph (Group 2)
11) Graham Rahal 1:09.8830 / 124.644 mph (Group 2)
24) Takuma Sato 1:14.8983 / 117.231 mph (Group 1; fastest lap – 1:10.8465)
GRAHAM RAHAL, No. 15 United Rentals Dallara/Honda/Firestone: “To say I’m disappointed with qualifying is an understatement. We ended up sixth in our group by only one-tenth-and-a-half or two-tenths of a second. It’s hard to swallow. You think about all the places that maybe you lost one-tenth (of a second). One-tenth (of a second) would have moved us up to second or third so it’s a hard one to swallow. Coming from eleventh place tomorrow is going to take some work but we’ve started in the back and finished third here before so we can do it again. We just have to have good strategy, be able to get by some of these guys and hope our fitness comes into play and go from there. But when you look at the data, there’s two corners in the snake – Turn 8 and 9 –and literally that’s our loss to everybody ahead of us. We are quicker in every other part of the race track but Turns 8 and 9 so I’ve got to figure it out and we’ve got to get the car a little better. We’ll try to get this United Rentals car up front tomorrow.”
TAKUMA SATO, No. 30 ABeam Consulting Dallara/Honda/Firestone: “The car was reasonably good in practice and after the session we felt we made good improvement. In qualifying, we were fifth in our group on black tires after the first run. It wasn’t great but it was better than practice. On the second run, the tire wasn’t up to temp and I was on the curb and lost grip and went off track. On the red tire, maybe I was relying too much on them and their grip. We lost a set of reds because of that, which is huge, because in the dry race, the red tire was more durable and faster.”
RLL AT THE IMS ROAD COURSE…. The Harvest GP will mark the eighth and ninth NTT INDYCAR SERIES races on the 2.439-mile road course. The team’s best finish here is second in 2015 and July 4, 2020 by Rahal and best start is fourth in 2020, also by Rahal.
NEXT UP: USA Network will begin coverage of Race 1 of the Harvest GP at 2:30 p.m. ET on Friday.