Indy Friday Grand Prix Practice Report

Helio Castroneves led a Chevrolet-dominated third practice session

In another display of Chevy power — Wait, this is the way that all of these reports have gone? — Helio Castroneves and Sebastien Bourdais laid down nearly identical laps to lead morning practice. Castroneves clocked 1:10:3756 in a last-minute lap, narrowly squeezing out Sebastien Bourdais by a quarter of a tenth of a second. Simon Pagenaud, Will Power, Scott Dixon, Juan Pablo Montoya and Tony Kanaan all were in the 1:10 range.

And once again, Graham Rahal lead the Honda team with the 8th fastest (Sato was 12th fastest in the 25 car field). Rahal was extremely animated as he came out of the car, and took a long while to stop wildly gesturing — or perhaps, it wasn't wild gestures, but a rehash of how the car was handling. "Challenging" is the word is politely used — "I won't say that it's awful." But he did say that there isn't 7/10 of a second in that car, which would've put him atop the leader board. "Maybe if we can stop the brakes from locking up, we'd pick up a tenth. But there isn't 7/10 of a second in the car."

Put Rahal down as a driver praying for the predicted rains during tomorrow's race — "At least things would be equal then" he suggested. The rain-soaked New Orleans race is Honda's lone bright spot for this year.
Startling, at least to me, is the lack of announcements about teams coming for the Indy 500. With practice starting on Monday, one would think… hope… that we'd already have more than 33 teams with solid efforts waiting for next week. But IndyCar is tight-lipped, and perhaps the gloomy estimates of no Bump Day (with bumping) are looking likely.

Qualification will be, according to IndyCar, just like last year. On Saturday, all teams run to establish the 33 that are in the field, making it Bump Day if we have more than 33 cars. On Sunday, the Fast Nine from the day before will go for the Pole position, and the remaining cars will qualify for actual starting position.

The likelihood of any of the cars having a keg of cold beer under the hood on Pit Road for either day of qualification is… remote.

— Tim Wohlford, reporting from IMS