Oilpressure

The good news for Alexander Rossi is that he was second-quick in this afternoon’s Practice Two. He was about half a second behind Colton Herta’s quick time of 1:15.3529, and was consistently quick throughout the practice. The bad news for Rossi was that he went into Turn Ten way too hot on cold red tires, and smacked the tire barrier with the right front of his car. In the process, he destroyed his front wing and bent his suspension.

There was less than five minutes remaining in the forty-five minute session. IndyCar officials decided to extend the session a little longer. That was unfortunate for Scott Dixon. For the second time in the session, he spun in Turn Four. At first, he managed to hit nothing with his car. But he tried spinning the car around with acceleration, and ended up backing the car into the wall and knocking off his rear-wing. That pretty much brought the session to a close.

The Top-Five speeds from this afternoon’s session were Colton Herta, Alexander Rossi, Scott Dixon, Alex Palou and Sébastien Bourdais. helio Castroneves rebounded nicely from yesterday, to post the twelfth quickest speed. Jimmie Johnson was twenty-second quick with Conor Daly, Max Chilton, Takuma Sato, Dalton Kellett and Cody Ware all posting slower times than the seven-time NASCAR champion.

It is much hotter today than yesterday. It is currently 88°, which is already the projected high. The humidity that had been absent in the earlier part of the week has returned with force. It’s quite unpleasant out there. That hasn’t deterred the crowds, however. Before the noon practice, the grounds were buzzing with people.

We passed by one of the smaller IndyCar trailers that was set up near the concession area. Usually you can walk right up with only one or two people in line (if that). Today, there was quite the line – and this isn’t even the main place to buy merchandise. Not only did they have the usual IndyCar products, but they also had a wide variety of Music City Grand Prix merchandise. FYI…That’s Mrs. Oilpressure to the far left in the royal blue shirt.

Last, but not least…I was able to sample the breaded pork tenderloin sandwich that we saw advertised yesterday. It was quite tasty with a well-seasoned batter that was very crunchy, but not greasy. I could have done without all of the lettuce, but it certainly helped satisfy my tenderloin craving, since I haven’t had one since May.

That will do it for now. Qualifying is at 3:30 local time and available on Peacock only. Susan is sitting next to me typing away on her post that will be up here at some point today. I’ll be back here after qualifying. Check back then.

George Philips

This entry was posted on August 7, 2021 at 2:37 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.