IndyCar Series Media
Q:Vitor, first of all I want to say congratulations, what a tremendous race. Take a little bit of an issue with something Ryan said. You were mentioning outside, I know, that it’s time for the big three to start looking out because Panther, you know, has had some good shows. You finished second here twice in Indianapolis and I have two parts to my question. One is, I thought we were expecting a lot more sunshine today and I wondered if the cloud cover keeping conditions a little cooler sort of played into the fact that you had trimmed out your car in cooler weather. The second question I had was if you could tell me what was running through your mind the last 18 months after Andretti passed Castroneves and was on your tail.
MEIRA: It definitely helped us, the weather. That’s what we planned; we looked really close to it. That’s the reason of our comeback and not as strong in the beginning of the race but very strong to the end of the race, was what we planned. There was one day that the track was really close to race conditions and race laps as overall laps. So we really focused on that day. We actually did a hundred and some laps that day. That’s where it took us.
As soon as Marco overtook Helio, I knew he was coming, he was very strong. He was also being very aggressive, pushing a lot. I could see that he would catch me, catch me and all of a sudden drop back. That’s because you push a little bit too much sometime and have to have a big lift. So I knew he was coming. I knew he had the car and he wanted to. But so I did, too, wanted to catch Dixon. Again, we had the car; it just didn’t work everything out. On the pit stops, he was a little better because of the position he was being in first place. He caught us there, and as you saw, as you guys saw throughout the day, hard to pass.
Q: Congratulations on your second-place finish. I think it was 39 laps to go and a great move by you there on the straightaway. Would you talk about that, please?
MEIRA: Yes, that was a restart. Ed Carpenter stayed out. I knew he wouldn’t have a good restart since he had old tires. Scott had a good restart. I got advantage of the slipstream, and as soon as I saw the space outside right after we passed Carpenter, I went there and just actually I went there just for some clean air, but then the car kept rolling and kept going. So that’s my opportunity. I mean, I’m not going to have many opportunities from now on. I’ve got to take that. So never lifted and happened what happened.
Q: Vitor, you’ve been talking all month about how good your car has been and in every condition that we’ve had to deal with here. Did you have to do a lot of changes to it today or was it pretty consistent throughout?
MEIRA: Yeah, we did a lot of changes. The only changes we did was front wing. We were for some reason a little off on front wing, so actually we did almost two turns of front wing throughout the race. That’s what the first four, five pit stops are for, get to tune the car and get the hand of it. Right after we did those front-wing changes, the car came alive, and it matched the track, the weather improved a little bit, it came toward us.
Again, you have to do something right in order to finish good at the ‘500.’ Dixon really deserved it. He, I mean he was by far pole. Ganassi was very dominant here throughout the race. So congrats to them, but we had a very good car, too.
Q: Vitor, I know a hundred miles is a long way to go in the Indianapolis 500 but you were in front after 400 miles. Were you beginning to think I just might pull this thing off today?
MEIRA: I was, sure. Not sure but as sure as I could be with Dixon on my butt. (Laughter)
So I thought right when I was in third place right on that restart, I thought now we can win, now we can win. Now we put ourselves in position to win. That’s what happened. Again, we did the Delphi National Guard crew did their job, I did my job and we put ourselves in position to win. Again, we had the car, we had the crew, just didn’t work out this time.
Q: How close do you, how much closer do you feel you are to victory than before even?
MEIRA: It’s very close. I mean this feels like a victory for us. How many, even in the grandstands here, how many of you guys counted me as leading Lap 160 or whatever? Not many. We did and we believed it and we’re always going to. We always, no matter what, going to do our best. When I got out of the car, I saw that everybody on the team was very happy. National Guard people was happy, Delphi people was happy, I was very happy. And the reason is we took everything out we had. Looking at the beginning of this year and the end of last year, this is a very, very good result. I will never take it for granted.
Q: Two-part question. Why were there so many yellow flags? And secondly, does yellow-flag running affect the driver’s ability to concentrate on the race?
MEIRA: That’s a good point. In fact, we did not have one green pit stop. I was wondering about that come like 50 laps to go. I don’t know, I think the yellow flags, they came on the right time, to be honest. Always like toward the end of the stint, nothing really major really happened, I think, from where I was sitting. And they were just either good or bad timed. I don’t know in number of yellows if we had more or less than past years but we sure had a lot and we did not have any green pit stops, which it’s a little unusual, but I’m not complaining.
