Saturday Morning Update from Long Beach

Can Dixon get the pole today?

Good morning from Long Beach. The weather is staying perfect with the high temperature expected to reach 74 today. Today's schedule for the Indy cars which practice at 9 am and then qualify at 12:10 pm. There won't be much time to make adjustments to the cars with such a short turn around time. And the reason for the short day is that the Bubba Burger Sportscar Grand Prix starts at 2 pm this afternoon,

Scott Dixon, the defending series champion, told the media that he still had some time in his Honda powered car. "I think it was only an average run. I think I missed the timing line when I went to get the fast lap out of it. We ran long and the grip felt high, but I made a pretty big mistake in the first two laps. We didn't really get what we wanted out of it and I think we had the potential this morning. I think the Hondas look strong. As you can tell every weekend, it's super tight and the mix is quite heavy, so we will have to see what we can do to try to create a bit of a gap there."

Ryan Hunter-Reay, the second fastest for Friday practice, was confident after his run on Friday. "Really, we're just getting back to finding our baseline. Last year, we had very competitive cars. Again, this year rolled off with a really good setup I think. It was a good starting point.

Hunter-Reay was happy with his time

We've made some changes to it trying to find what to do, what not to do, as you regularly would on a street course."

"The tricky part of a street course is you have to keep up with the racetrack, you have to be proactive with keeping up with it. As you go through the race weekend, it's constantly changing conditions. I definitely learned a lot. I know what to apply for tomorrow."

Felix Rosenqvist, Dixon's rookie teammate at Ganassi Racing, was third fastest in his first time at Long Beach. The young Swede commented on his day, "It was a pretty good day in the beginning and it felt like I had some work to do on the driving in the first practice. This is kind of a technical circuit, for sure. Then in the second practice on blacks (Firestone primary tires), it felt not the best, but then on reds (Firestone alternate it seemed like we had a lot of pace. Scott (Dixon) in P1 and me in P3 and I think I had a kind of dodgy run and still, I was able to go to P3, and we didn't really wait until the end when the track was the best. So I think that is promising for tomorrow. We still have something I want to get better in the car but overall, a really good first day in the NTT DATA car."

Will Power

Will Power has won two poles in the last three races, was 15th on the timing charts for practice. The Team Penske driver can never be counted out for putting his number 12 in the first starting position. Power commented on this first day, "Obviously, the second session was a bit messy for us. We had a couple of issues. We got some good data from our teammates and have some great stuff to look at. We look to improve the Verizon Chevy for tomorrow."

Check back for more AR1 udpates.

Lucille Dust reporting live from Long Beach