Oilpressure

I’m not sure many of the teams got much out of Practice One this morning at Barber Motorsports Park. It was a very disjointed practice from the very beginning. It seemed that for the first half of the practice, very few teams had any interest in running. Felix Rosenqvist, Pato O’Ward, Colton Herta and Marcus Ericsson appeared to be the only ones running.

I don’t know many crew members, but I ran into one that I know pretty well as the practice was still going on. He explained that rookies get an extra set of tires, so it is common practice to let the rookies go out and lay the rubber down – so that the veterans don’t have to use up their own tires. As long as I’ve been following this sport, I never knew that. I’m sure most of you did, but I didn’t. I guess you’re never too old to learn new things.

It was not a productive day for Matheus Leist. He turned a total of one lap before spinning violently about three-fourths of the way through his second lap. His nose needed replacing, but his car was returned to the paddock on a hook. Most drivers turned less than ten laps.

Felix Rosenqvist was the fastest in the session with a time of 1:09.2296. Sébastien Bourdais was just a tick behind. James Hinchcliffe, Scott Dixon and Ryan Hunter-Reay rounded out the Top-Five. You have to go down to seventh place to find the fastest Chevy, driven by Pato O’Ward.

I took a couple of decent photos. One was of Alexander Rossi preparing for practice, and the other was of Ben Hanley in the DragonSpeed car. I wanted to show DragonSpeed a little love because everyone tends to overlook them. Hanley was only twenty-third out of twenty-four cars that ran.

Practice Two will be at 2:50 Central tie. Count on there being a lot more takers for the afternoon. The sun has come out and the temperatures have risen. This will probably be a lot closer to race conditions on Sunday.

That’s going to do it for now. I will have a Friday wrap-up later on this afternoon. In the meantime, please follow us on Twitter. Follow me at @Oilpressureblog or Susan at @MrsOilpressure. Please check back later.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on April 5, 2019 at 2:00 pm and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.