Chip Ganassi Racing rookie Linus Lundqvist says the opportunity for a reset during the break in the schedule between Saturday night’s NTT IndyCar Series race at World Wide Technology Raceway and the previous race at Toronto three weeks earlier played a part in his matching his career-best result of third.
“Unbelievably happy,” he said. “We’ve had a season with a lot of ups and downs, let’s put it that way. I think the summer break was actually good, I think, for everybody on the team to kind of take a little bit of time to reflect — especially on my side — on the lessons that I’ve had to learn.
“Basically before that it was flat out since end of April. I haven’t had a proper time to go back and look through everything I learned. It was all preparation for the next weekend. The month of May was hectic. Good to get a bit of a break and kind of let everything settle down. Hopefully now with this momentum, we can finish the year off strongly and show what we learned.”
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Good vibes were important, but so were good tires. Lundqvist was fifth when the race was red-flagged with 10 laps to go after the restart crash involving Will Power and Alexander Rossi, but he’d just had a new set of Firestones bolted onto his No. 8 Honda a few laps earlier. The two cars ahead of him — those of teammate Alex Palou and Andretti Global’s Colton Herta — had not.
“I was nervous as anybody,” he said of the final restart. “Basically when they said we were P5 in the restart, I was like, ‘All right, I wouldn’t be too unhappy if I saw a checkered flag right now. I’d take a P5.’ Then the red came out.
“I was a little bit worried about what was going to happen with the guys behind us. They said, ‘Everybody else was a lap behind.’ That makes me feel a little bit better.
“I knew we had a pretty big tire advantage going forward. I think Alex and Herta had, like, 45- or 50-lap-old tires. We were basically on stickers. I knew we might have a possibility to do something here. Obviously got around Alex as he got squeezed into Turn 1, then one or two laps later we got the move done on Herta.
“Towards the end we had five or six laps to kind of let it go. I knew that a podium was on the cards and we got it done.”
Saturday’s third place matches Lundqvist’s career-best finish, which he scored early in the season at Barber, and comes at a time of uncertainty at CGR as the team weighs the possibility of needing to downsize from five entries to three to comply with the requirements of IndyCar’s proposed charter system, which mandates a maximum of three cars per team.
“My focus right now is just finish the year strong and try to show what we learned from the beginning of the year,” Lundqvist said. “I’d like to think we’ve showed that when everything comes together, we can be as fast as anybody, dare I say, and hopefully look forward to next year and to stringing it all together [to do] what we’re all here to do, which is compete for championships.”