Details of the Day
- With the result, Scott Dixon finishes qualifying for the 2017 season as the only driver to have made every Firestone Fast 6 final qualifying round.
Scott Dixon, No. 9 NTT DATA Honda: “I think the air temperature change might have thrown us off a bit. The NTT DATA car was good this morning but then we just didn’t have the grip. We were lucky to find a few things and scrape through the qualifying rounds. I actually made a big mistake in turn 3 that costed us some time but I don’t think it would have put us close to the top, maybe just up one more position. I think we’re the best of the rest today but the race is tomorrow and there is a lot that can happen between the start and the checkered flag. I’m looking forward to it.”
Tony Kanaan, No. 10 NTT DATA Honda: “I think we’re just still pretty far off from where we need to be to make sure we’re competitive this weekend. We barely made it out of the first round and we tried a setup change in the second round that obviously didn’t work for us. I guess the silver lining here is that we learned something from that setup change we made during qualifying that we can definitely use in the race tomorrow.”
Charlie Kimball, No. 83 Tresiba® Honda: “We made some changes that were in the wrong direction today for qualifying. We’ll definitely have to unwind some of those tomorrow for the warmup session and the race. Scott made it through to the top six, so that’s good for Chip Ganassi Racing. We’ll look at what he was able to do in qualifying and try to learn from his data. I just wasn’t able to get the lap time I needed out of the Tresiba Honda today. It’s always tough when you know you want to be going quicker than the lap times you’re doing, but we’ll figure it out and be ready for tomorrow.”
Max Chilton, No. 8 Gallagher Honda: “It’s going to be hard to get forward from where we’re starting but we’ll do our best in the Gallagher car and work together as a team. Scott managed to do it here in 2015 and get the job done so I’m sure we can do it again. On the No. 8 car we’ve been struggling but have been making gains each session. I felt that was one of my best qualifying sessions of the year and I was happy with the job I did. Sometimes you’re just fighting a losing battle with the amount of downforce you’re carrying. Hopefully we can move forward and have a good race and Scott is spraying champagne at the end of the day for the Ganassi team.”
Qualifying Results
P1 No. 2 Newgarden, Chevrolet – 1:15.520
P2 No. 12 Power, Chevrolet – 1:15.555
P3 No. 1 Pagenaud, Chevrolet – 1:15.635
P6 No. 9 NTT DATA Honda (Dixon) – 1:16.397
P12 No. 10 NTT DATA Honda (Kanaan) – 1:16.971
P14 No. 8 Gallagher Honda (Chilton) – 1:16.758
P15 No. 83 Tresiba® Honda (Kimball) – 1:17.141
TIL NEXT TIME, I AM STILL WORKING ON MY REDNECK!
