Paul Tracy has just held a post-qualifying press conference after failing to make the field for this year’s Indianapolis 500. Tracy withdrew his time — which would have been enough to make the race — and was unable to get himself back into the field. He was left in the qualifying line when the 6 p.m. gun went off to signal the end of Bump Day.
Here’s a piece of his comments to the press:
“The speed was in the car at various times of the day. All week, the car was 225, 226 — two days ago, we were second quickest on the track! We ran a 225 this morning. When the temperature came up, we lost the handle on the car and couldn’t get it back. It wasn’t for a lack of trying. We changed a lot of things on the car. We changed the springs, we changed dampers, we changed roll centers, we changed aero. It wasn’t like we were sitting on our hands waiting to go. But we felt at the time there, we were pretty safe where we were. Turns out we would’ve still been in. But it’s a team decision.
“We worked as a team all week and we make decisions as a team. You win and lose as a team, so I’ve had a lot of wins in my career where we’ve made calls that were the right calls, and we’ve made calls that were bad calls. I just feel really frustrated for all the sponsors that got on board — this is not a cheap endeavor. We put a lot of work into this and we came up short as a team. It’s frustrating.”
