Photo Credit: Chris Owens/IndyCar
For the Angie’s List Grand Prix of Indianapolis, James Hinchcliffe, driver of the No. 5 Arrow Electronics Honda, qualified in third position which is his best qualifying effort this season.
“Yeah, definitely,” he said. “We’ve been kind of knocking on the door of the fast six for the last couple rounds. It was nice to finally break into that. Not really full of the usual suspects. Charlie(Kimball) and I were joking, probably the youngest median age, six different teams.”
The Canadian was on Firestone Red tires during the final session for qualifying.
“That was a cool session,” he said. “Mainly it was getting the lap on the Firestone reds.
“They were good for one lap and one lap only. To strap on, no testing with them, no practice with them, trying to find the limit. Even missing by a fraction of a second made such a difference.
“Like I said, such a dream to drive this thing on a brand-new set of sticker reds on one lap, then you start finding problems with it. But it’s good till then.
“It makes me want to cry. I don’t want to cry.”
The red tires in qualifying were wearing off rather quickly and could be interesting to see how they handle in a race environment.
“I mean, the tire’s good,” he said. “It’s just that ultimate speed is only there for one lap. We obviously have no idea how it’s going to degrade over a full stint. If you lose a couple of 10ths from your fast lap, I can stay there for a while. That will be the tire to be on tomorrow.
“We’re looking at temperatures considerably colder that we’ve seen all weekend tomorrow. That’s definitely going to affect the tire degradation and grip. Going into tomorrow, it’s a little bit of guesswork about tire strategy and set up and how it takes care of them.”
The race will be run on May 14th on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course.
