Ron McQueeney/IMS
Graham Rahal, No. 02 McDonald’s Dallara/Honda/Firestone:
“It was not a good day for us. Others that were in the championship battle with us had problems and we couldn’t capitalize because the car wasn’t good. We literally had to finish the race because of the championship but it was challenging. The car was so loose. If I was on my own, the car was okay but if I got even remotely close to someone the car went incredibly loose. It was the hardest race of my life because I was holding my breath every single corner of every lap. There is so little track time and coming here to put it all together on a race weekend puts too much pressure on us. We’re going to keep working hard and the McDonald’s team will be back at the front. We made huge gains from last year to this year but we can’t make the same amount of gains from this year to next because we’re already close now that we can’t expect the same amount. All we need to do is make some gains and we’ll be right in the hunt week-in and week-out.”
Fast Facts: Finished seventh in the standings with 385 points in his second season in the IndyCar series…Finished 11th in his first race here. In 2008, he missed the season-opening race here due to a crash in T2 on the final day of a two-day test here on Tuesday night of race week. The team was unable to repair the car in time for race weekend and Rahal watched from the spotter’s stand…. Highest start this season is two poles (St. Pete/street & Kansas/oval) and highest finish is third place at Richmond and Japan.
Alex Lloyd, No. 40202 HER Energy Dallara/Honda/Firestone:
“All in all it was a pretty good day for the HER Energy team. We lost a quite a few places on the start and I think that was just me being overly cautious. I’ve never raced an Indy car on a 1.5 mile oval and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect in Turn 1. Everybody just nailed it and I lifted too much and we got swarmed by people. In the second half of that stint we had a good car and came through quite a few cars so I thought ‘OK, this is looking quite good. ‘ I felt like we could race with some of the quick guys. And then as the race went on, every stint we started to get more and more understeer that we couldn’t get rid of and that really cost us. We finished about where we were at the end of the day. All in all it was a good day. There are a lot of things that I am learning as I go along which is an extremely good thing. We had a good car all weekend. We certainly could have been a little bit better in the race but I think we came away with some really good things – a lot of positives. There were a lot more positives than negatives so I’m definitely happy and I think everybody at HER Energy will be happy too.”
Fast Facts: His fifth place start and eighth place finish are both series-best to date of his three IndyCar Series starts…Was his second race here. Started second and won the 2007 Indy Lights race here in his title winning season. The Lights race was with Sam Schmidt Motorsports…It was his first race with the team and third in the IndyCar Series after competing in the Indy 500 in 2008 & 2009.
NHLR At Homestead: It was the team’s seventh race here (1996-2000 with Michael Andretti & Christian Fittipaldi; 2008 with Justin Wilson and 2009 with Graham Rahal and Alex Lloyd. In total NHLR has earned TWO WINS (Andretti – 1997, 1998) and THREE PODIUM finishes here (2nd – Andretti 1999, after he stalled on final stop while making a run at the leader). Fittipaldi earned the team’s highest start here of fourth place in 1998 and his highest finish here was also fourth that same year. Wilson started and finished 15th in the team’s first race as a fulltime entrant in the IndyCar Series here in 2008.
