Leeds, AL (April 23, 2016) – The Dale Coyne Racing team had mixed results during qualifying Saturday for the Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama with Luca Filippi qualifying 12th and Rookie Conor Daly 17th for tomorrow’s race.
For the second race in a row, Filippi and his Boy Scouts of America car made it to the second round of qualifying thanks to a lap of 1:07.2243 and a top six position in Round 1/Group 2.
The Italian went out in the first half of Round 2 and set a fastest lap of 1:08.3655, which initially placed him fourth. The team then made the wise decision to sit out the remainder of the 10-minute session and save tires for Sunday’s race. Filippi found himself 12th once the checkered flag came out.
Daly was not as lucky as his teammate despite spending the majority of the session in the Top 3. The American set a fastest time of 1:07.2974 on his penultimate lap in Group 1 during the first round of qualifying but was unable to improve further with time running out. The driver of the Jonathan Byrd’s hospitality car missed out on the Top 6 and the second round, by a mere 0.05 seconds. His time placed him ninth in his group.
The Dale Coyne Racing duo will be back on track at 10:30am for a warm up session and a last chance to fine tune their cars.
The Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama will go green at 3:45pm ET, Sunday, April 24th, with the race broadcast starting at 3pm ET on NBCSN.
Live timing and scoring will be available at racecontrol.Indycar.com.
Dale Coyne Racing Driver Quotes
Luca Filippi – #19 Boy Scouts of America
“The top 12 was our aim in qualifying today. We are the third Honda so I think we did a good job. The car worked fine and we found a good set up. From my point of view, it was important to get to the Fast 12. Once in the top 12, we knew that there wasn’t that much to gain for us, so we focused on saving tires for tomorrow’s race. Now we have plenty of tires and plenty of options to decide what is best. So if we want to run mainly Firestone Reds we can, if we want to run blacks we can do that too. We decided to look towards the race and now we have to focus on getting a good consistent pace. Tomorrow, maybe the strategy could play out and it could be interesting.”
Conor Daly – #18 Jonathan Byrd’s Hospitality & Restaurant Group
“The great thing is that it is so close out there. When you finish a qualifying session and you’re four tenths off of Scott Dixon you feel pretty good. We just missed the next round by ‘that much’, by 0.05 seconds. That’s really disappointing because it felt really quick, it felt really good. For me, I think I left some on the table that I haven’t taken advantage of on this track, so I just need to work on things. It’s a really tough place for my driving style, I think it’s difficult for me to maximize the speed here. The good thing about this race is that there’s open strategic windows. We’ve got (Juan Pablo) Montoya back with me, (Ryan) Hunter-Reay, Marco (Andretti), no slouches are in the back of the field with us. We’re going to try and see what happens. I’d like to charge through early and then maybe get off strategy, but we’ll see.”
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