The track surface between Turns 3 and 4 caused a lot of consternation for many drivers, with several striking the wall including Lundgaard on the exit of T3 and Rahal under braking for T4. Consequently the pair completed only 13 and 18 laps respectively, compared with the 29 of the session’s pacesetter Scott Dixon. They wound up 25th and 26th in the 27-car field.
“We are really lacking rear support and grip, which is natural,” said Rahal, who scored his first ever Indy car win at St Petersburg back in 2008. “Everybody is lacking grip but we’ve got to find a way to get some consistency.
“I can’t hit the brake pedal. I went straight on five or six times in the session which is not normal, and we ultimately ended our session with a wall brush due to the rear brakes locking, which shut the engine off and the whole deal.
“We’ve got to look into it, figure out what’s going on and get the United Rentals car turned around overnight.
“It’s close, its competitive. Only 1.4 seconds separates us from first and we’re in the back. Frankly I feel that I can’t push at all.
“That’s a positive actually, which may sound weird, but it’s a positive because I think we can find a lot of that gap if we can find some stability.”
Lundgaard, about to embark on only his second IndyCar season, said after his impact which robbed him of the last 15 minutes of his practice, “That was not the way we wanted to finish the session, but I think there are some positives to take from the session. We didn’t really have the competitive car that we hoped and expected to have.
“The wind is quite strong out there and if that’s what messed up the balance, I don’t know. Apparently, that’s across two of our cars so we’ll have to dig deep tomorrow and see how much we can improve for qualifying.”
By contrast, Jack Harvey – who suffered a poor year compared with his team-mates in 2022 – sounded upbeat about his performance that saw him finish the day in 17th and around 0.7s faster.
“I thought that was a good start for us there,” he said. “Every time we went on track, I thought we were a top-10 car.
“We went to new tires at the end to improve our time but found another car that wouldn’t move out of the way but I thought we had a potential top-10 car. The balance was pretty good so hopefully we just keep that going throughout the weekend.”
