After the mastery of ganassi in free practice on Wednesday, with all four cars in the top seven, Thursday continued with good news for Álex Palou’s team. They took full advantage of the six hours of work given the forecast of rain for the fast friday on Friday and some even began to test small set up for the rankings. It was not the case palou who began his program with car adjustments in traffic and records similar to those of the previous session. He put on a ganassi in front of the table, this time the car of ericssonwith a speed of 229 MPH, as they did Sato and Dixon in Practice 3, and was back palou by the head, starting in third position, a place that he held for a good part of the day until the last moments when he dropped to ninth. “I feel pretty good for the Indianapolis 500. We have been very fast in the last two years. I think we just need to try to get the strategy right, be more confident in the traffic and have a clean day. We have the championship lead, which feels incredible, and we must maintain it and also go for the Indianapolis 500”, explains Palou from the The Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
before the crazy happy hour (last hour of each session), Ganassi continued with his good feelings, dividing the work between his drivers and taking over the timing and with the four cars within a top-6 monopolized by the Spanish team and McLaren, commanded by the Swede, followed by Dixon, O’Ward, Palou, Rossi and Sato. “The organization is very impressive,” Sato said. “Everything is in the right place and the right people. I think it was a really solid good day. We learned quite a few things. In the end, we’re putting it all together. It was definitely good to see all the Ganassi cars near the top ”, underlines the Japanese, winner of the 500 on two occasions, with Andretti and Rahal Letterman Lanigan, and who in 2023 makes his debut in Ganassi.
Then in the last minutes the table changed due to slipstreams and there was a moment of tension due to the accumulation of cars on the track (RC Enerson and O’Ward almost collided when the McLaren man came out of the pits). They broke into the top-10 Simon Pagenaud (meyer shank), Conor Daley (with the car of Ed Carpenter), Colton Herta (Andretti) and Will Power (Penske) and Palou dropped to ninth, but the lead remained unchanged with another 1-2 for Ganassi (Ericsson-Dixon) that put all four cars back in the top-10. And if the McLarens were found to be missing on the first day of action, they appeared on Thursday with O’Ward, eighth, Rossi, tenth, and kanaanwho only competes in the oval, in thirteenth position.
