Team Penske Makes Most Of Rain-Shortened Indy Practice
May 20, 2010
The three Team Penske cars combined for 141 laps and once again recorded some of the fastest laps of the session, which was delayed several times and eventually cut short due to light rain at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Three-time Indy 500 champion Helio Castroneves had the sixth-fastest lap of the day at 226.080 mph in the No. 3 Team Penske Dallara/Honda. He completed 53 laps on Thursday as the team began to dial in for this Saturday's pole qualifying.
"Team Penske continued working on the car today - we tried to take advantage of the traffic out there and the warmer temperatures," said Castroneves. "We started working on our qualifying set up and we were making some good progress before the rain came. I think we are going in the right direction. Hopefully tomorrow we'll have a chance to continue and improve even more."
Looking forward to his third Indy 500 at the end of the month, Will Power had the seventh-fastest lap at 225.836 mph in the No. 12 Verizon Team Penske Dallara/Honda.
"We finally got the chance to run in the sunshine today, at least for a little while," said Power. "We made some changes to the Verizon car ahead of practice this morning and we had some really good, steady laps out there preparing for qualifying this weekend. We obviously want to be in the fast nine cars Saturday so we have a chance at the pole and we focused quite a bit on that today. Hopefully tomorrow won't be a washout, but Team Penske will do everything we can to be prepared on Saturday either way."
After carding the second-fastest time on Wednesday, Ryan Briscoe checked in with a fast lap of 224.811 mph in the No. 6 Team Penske machine, which placed him 16th on Thursday's time charts.
"We actually continued doing some work on our race car today and then we transferred over to working on our qualifying set-up," said Briscoe. "We were able to do some runs in the different track conditions. This place is so big that the wind direction and the weather changes the track from corner to corner. We were able to get a good read on a few different conditions today and increase our overall knowledge moving toward qualifying and the race."
Indy 500 practice is scheduled to resume Friday at 12 p.m. ET, though rain is in the forecast. Saturday's Pole Day qualifying is set to begin at 11 a.m. ET and will be televised live on Versus. The 94th running of the Indianapolis 500 is scheduled for Sunday, May 30 at 1 p.m. ET with ABC's live coverage beginning at 12 p.m.