CHEVROLET RACING IN THE VERIZON INDYCAR SERIES
100TH RUNNING OF THE INDIANAPOLIS 500
INDIANAPOLIS MOTOR SPEEDWAY
TEAM CHEVY DAY 3 PRACTICE RECAP
MAY 18, 2016

Although it is day three of the march to the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500, it was only the second full-practice session for the 33 participants preparing for the May 29th race. Mother Nature took control of Tuesday’s events and forced cancelation of practice for the Verizon IndyCar Series.

Leading the way for Chevrolet today was Will Power in his No. 12 Verizon Team Penske Chevrolet with a quick lap of 227.733 mph/39.520 seconds that put him third in the order. Other Team Chevy drivers showing strength with top-10 times in their Chevrolet Aero Kit race cars with V6 2.2 liter Chevrolet engines were Josef Newgarden, Charlie Kimball and Sage Karam.

With every team and driver on a different agenda in their preparations, times and speed fluctuated throughout the session with some cars in qualifying trim, others in race trim and still others somewhere in between.

All 33 cars made it onto the 2.5-mile Indianapolis Motor Speedway oval today, making up for a complete rainout Tuesday by completing a total of 2,779 laps – an average of 84 per car. Only two incidents slowed the action, neither involving a Chevrolet entry.

Practice will resume on Thursday May 19 at noon and run to 6:00 p.m. and will be streamed live on RaceControl.IndyCar.com.

TEAM CHEVY DRIVER QUOTES:
WILL POWER, NO. 12 VERIZON TEAM PENSKE CHEVROLET: “(On a day like today how do you know what you see) Just looking at no-tow laps. When someone is leading the pack, you can see the overall speed by themselves and then you can see how good they are in traffic with the speeds, so you get a pretty good idea of the downforce they’re running, so it gives you an idea of the pace of the car.”
JOSEF NEWGARDEN, NO. 21 PREFERRED FREEZER ED CARPENTER RACING CHEVROLET: “Practice here at Indy is so interesting. Everyone’s up and down on the time sheets and it’s kind of hard to put any stock into what you see on practice days. Everyone’s getting tow laps, some people are in qualifying trim and some aren’t. For us today I think we made the car better in traffic. That’s why we were able to get a better tow lap and go towards the top of the sheets. I still feel like we’ve got a little bit more to go. I think we’re feeling good. Compared to last year I think we’ve made progress with our car and had a good starting package. We’ve had to work on it. It’s been a little different with some of the safety advancements that we’ve had to put on the car but overall I think we’ve got great cars. I think we’re quick, I really think our ECR cars are going to be fast. It’d be great to have the Fuzzy’s car with Ed fast and JR and I in the Preferred Freezer cars want to be up there too. I feel like we’re going to be quick on qualifying day; hopefully that’s true. The most important thing for us is just trying to make the traffic running good. I feel like we’re going to be in a big pack all race, which is great for the show, but makes it difficult to drive in so we’ve just been working on making that the best as possible.”
CHARLIE KIMBALL, NO. 42 TRESIBA CHIP GANASSI RACING CHEVROLET: “Today went really well for the No. 42 Tresiba® Chevrolet. I think a lot of guys were excited to get back out on-track, especially after getting rained out yesterday. It was a beautiful day at IMS and the No. 42 car ran pretty well. We did a lot of work in traffic working on the race setup and I was pretty happy with where we ended the day. We made some changes that made the car better and we made some changes that we decided weren’t the right way to go. Overall I think Chip Ganassi Racing has a solid foundation to learn from heading into the next couple of days. Looking ahead, we’ll probably do a couple of race work runs to start the day and then we’ll start getting a solid eye toward qualifying this weekend.”
SAGE KARAM, NO. 24 DREYER & REINBOLD KINGDOM RACING GAS MONKEY ENERGY CHEVROLET: “Pretty good day, a productive day for the No. 24 Gas Monkey Energy Chevrolet. We ran a lot more laps today than we did Monday, and it’s good to be out there just feeling the car out. We just worked on race setup today, I think we ended the day P8, so we’re really pleased with that. The car is pretty good in traffic, it’s a lot harder to pass this year compared to years prior, but it looks like that for everyone, not just us. But we seem to be on the better end of getting passes done to other people, so I’d say we have a pretty good race car right now. We just have to keep chipping away at it, keep working at it. We still have a couple more practice days here, and i’m excited to see where we can go with this race car. It’s all about being able to get close too the guy in front of you in the corner and staying flat on the throttle, and that’s how passing is going to get done. It looks like everyone’s struggling with that right now, so hopefully we can eliminate some of those issues and we’ll be good from there.”
SEBASTIEN BOURDAIS, NO. 11 TEAM HYDROXYCUT – KVSH CHEVROLET: “It was an interesting day for the Hydroxycut – KVSH Racing team. We tried a lot of things and as usual you think you have made a step forward and then you think was that really better. It is one of those things where you have one car in front, it’s okay, two cars in front, it’s still pretty good and then I get four, five, 10 cars in front, there is no air on the car and it gets really tricky. It’s like you are looking and searching for the impossible. You want a car that handles perfect even in a big train of cars. We’ll see. I think the Hydroxycut machine is in the ballpark. We just need to keep ticking things off the list and try and make it better.”
SIMON PAGENAUD, NO. 22 MENARDS TEAM PENSKE CHEVROLET:
“It was a good day for the Menards Team Penske Chevrolet and the car is getting pretty competitive out there in practice. We had good weather today and so we were able to get a lot of laps in. I think we’re going to be okay and definitely looking forward to the end of the week.”
JUAN PABLO MONTOYA, NO. 2 VERIZON TEAM PENSKE CHEVROLET: “It was a good day. I drove the Verizon Chevy a lot. We’re still a little behind the Hondas, but overall I’m pretty happy.”
JR HILDEBRAND, NO. 6 PREFERRED FREEZER FUZZY’S VODKA ED CARPENTER RACING CHEVROLET: “It was good to get a full day in. With Monday having refresher practice and that kind of stuff it was a little choppy. So we’re just getting with the program. I felt like we made a lot of progress with the car. Ed, Josef and I were all trying a bunch of different stuff. I think at this point we’ve just got to be able to go back and see what we’ve got so we can take the best from everything and get with the program again tomorrow. Qualifying will be here before we know it. I think we all made progress today.”
MAX CHILTON, NO. 8 GALLAGHER CHIP GANASSI RACING CHEVROLET: “I’m learning something new every day here at the speedway. Today was a solid day and I’m just easing my way into this and not rushing or putting myself in a bad positon. I think the Gallagher team is working well together and we’re working step by step toward our plan for qualifying this weekend.”
SCOTT DIXON, NO. 9 TARGET CHIP GANASSI RACING CHEVROLET, 2015 VERIZON INDYCAR SERIES CHAMPION: “Today we didn’t do that much running in the Target Chevy. We used two sets of tires and the changes took a little while in between runs. We did some race trim running and it seems like some of the other cars have trimmed out a little bit more. I’m not real happy with the car middle-off as it has some washout and some understeer. We have some work to do but I’m confident we’ll get there.”
HELIO CASTRONEVES, NO. 3 PENNZOIL TEAM PENSKE CHEVROLET: “The Pennzoil Chevy was good. We made some really good progress. We struggled a little in the beginning, but at the end we felt we had a much better balance and I was quite happy with the car. So far, the speed is not quite there yet. Hopefully, tomorrow, we start looking for a little bit of qualifying and see what happens.”
TONY KANAAN, NO. 10 NTT DATA CHIP GANASSI RACING CHEVROLET: “It was really good for us to get a full day of practice in today after losing an entire day yesterday to rain. The No. 10 NTT DATA Chevrolet felt pretty good today, especially on our qualifying runs. We spent the early part of the session working through some qualifying simulations and then came out later in the afternoon to get some full tank runs in and some time working with our teammates out on-track. We’re still working through some tweaks and trying to get some speed, but overall it was a good day today at the track.”

MATT BRABHAM, NO. 61 PIRTEK TEAM MURRAY – KVRT CHEVROLET: “It has been fantastic to do so many laps today, I’m feeling more comfortable in the car, which is the biggest thing. I’m enjoying it a lot more and getting further experience each time around here which is going to be good for when it counts come qualifying day and the race. I’m really happy with how it’s all progressing.

“Running in the pack is a lot more hairy, but I felt OK, theres some work to do on my side of just learning how to time things right and run in traffic – and I think there’s a lot we can improve on the car to help that. For the rest of the week, getting me up to speed in this area is going to be one of our main goals and of course making sure our race car is to the top level.

“I’m enjoying myself, running on our own, we’re really good and have some good pace there – the car is good in clean air which will be good for qualifying, the PIRTEK Team Murray crew is doing a great job, I think we just need to keep working on our racecar and see how that goes.”
ED CARPENTER, NO. 20 FUZZY’S ULTRA PREMIUM VODKA ED CARPENTER RACING CHEVROLET: “It was a pretty good day. We got through quite a few changes. It wasn’t the flashiest day but we got a lot of work done. We definitely made the car better in traffic which is something that we still needed to do. I feel a lot better about it. We do need to start getting some speed out of the car but Josef showed he had some speed so we’ll just put our heads down and see what we have tomorrow.”
STEFAN WILSON, NO. 25 DRIVEN2SAVELIVES – KVRT CHEVROLET: “It was a little bit frustrating this afternoon, we made some changes that were on our test plan and you know we just didn’t find the results that we wanted from those changes. We’re going to try to go back on some and make some different changes for tomorrow and hopefully get the handling back a little bit better. I’m really proud of all of my team, they put in a lot of work today to make those changes and we were able to evaluate them which moves the whole team forward finding out which things don’t quite work.”
BUDDY LAZIER, NO.4 LAZIER/BURNS RACING CHEVROLET: “Electrical issues slowed us down today. Our team is small but everyone is doing a great job, and when we did run the car was fantastic.”