Story By: ANNE FORNORO / AJ FOYT RACING – TORONTO, ONT – Qualifying for the Ontario Honda Dealers Indy Toronto Saturday afternoon was a bit surprising considering Santino Ferrucci was sixth quickest in the Sexton Properties Chevrolet in Friday’s practice session.
However, he will start 17th tomorrow. Ferrucci chalked it up to bad timing with traffic in his round of qualifying. The team also tried to address his comments from this morning’s practice when he wasn’t quite as happy with his car and made some adjustments for qualifying.
“Just mistimed it,” Ferrucci said after climbing out of the car. “It was just an error in our calculations. Just a bit unfortunate. We were out way too long on reds [greens], way too heavy with fuel when the tires were at their optimum and ended up running three laps at the same pace. But you know when you’re out there on reds [greens] and people are coming out on sticker tires and you’re just catching traffic, there’s nothing you can do. So, it’s kind of just terrible for us because now we start buried in the pack and that’s never good here but we’ll make due for tomorrow.
“Obviously, we’ve had great race pace all year long, I don’t think that’s going to change, we’re fighting some balance issues here this weekend. We’ve been on the back foot since FP1 and we were just trying to get some things changed but to be honest that’s how it goes on some street courses, so we’ll get it all tuned up and we’ll be good to go.”
Sting Ray Robb, who is not feeling any ill effects from his accident at Iowa Speedway last weekend, will start 27th in the No. 41 Goodheart Chevrolet. He remarked that they’d been struggling for speed all weekend.
“Just speed, we didn’t have any speed,” he said. “I don’t really know what it is thing that we’re struggling with — something that we just haven’t figured out yet. We’ve been trying different setups the last two days and this one didn’t work for us. So, we’ll probably unwind that a little bit and hopefully figure out something in the warm up tomorrow because right now we’re missing a lot.”
Colton Herta won the NTT P1 Award while teammate Kyle Kirkwood completed the front row. Rounding out the Firestone Fast Six were: Felix Rosenqvist, Scott McLaughlin, Romain Grosjean, and David Malukas.
There will be a final 30-minute practice tomorrow morning before the race kicks off at 1 p.m. ET. It will be streamed on Peacock.