Ryan Hunter-Reay, driver of the No. 28 DHL Honda, had a pretty decent second day of the Chevrolet Duals in Detroit.
His day started out with qualifications for the race. He was in the Group 2 where he finished in first position for that group, however he would start second for the race next to Simon Pagenaud who won the pole. RHR stayed up front pretty much throughout the race with his team making some pretty good pit road strategies which led him to finish in third place on the podium. This is Hunter-Reay’s best finish this season thus far.
“It was pretty drama-free,” Hunter-Reay said. “Just drove as hard as I could the entire time and wound up third unfortunately. Congrats to Team Penske. It was nice to finish third after the heartbreak of Indy, to have a solid run today. Obviously we’re not happy with third.
“I was pushing the ‘push to pass’ at the end, trying to close the gap. It wasn’t really working that well, so….We had good pace, but it wasn’t enough to close up and make a run for Simon or Will. Tough day. Very physical circuit. Two very physical races. I’m definitely a bit relieved that it’s over at this point.”
The former IndyCar Champion stated how physical the course at Belle Isle is on the drivers and even tougher because there are two races in one weekend. He says it was real brutal this year.
“The bumps were worse this year,” Hunter-Reay added. “You hear us IndyCar drivers talk about that. Everybody is like, Oh, be quiet about the bumps.
“But we run the cars on the ground basically already, right? When they do bottom and they hit on a big bump like that, our seats are this thin on the bottom, it goes right through your back. It hurts and it makes for an extremely physical race that way because you have all the kickback in the wheel.
“Detroit is one of the more physical tracks. Doing two races coming off a mentally and physically fatiguing Indy 500 month is as tough as it gets for sure. I wish there was something that looked more dramatic for you and the fans to see in the car. We’re wrestling those things. We’re pushing it to 110%.”
The American driver along with the rest of the IndyCar Series drivers heads to Texas Motor Speedway for the Firestone 500 on Saturday Night under the lights. TMS is a track that RHR runs well at so he is looking to carry the momentum from this race into next weekend.
“Yeah,” Hunter-Reay quoted. “Like I just said, it was our first day in quite a while where nothing went wrong, so that was nice. But, yeah, Texas is a very tricky racetrack. Every year it gets older, the surface gets more abrasive, the tire falloff is more dramatic. It’s going to be very tough, no doubt about it.
“You have a very small window to get Texas right on the setup. We’ll be working at it. We finished second there in the past. Hopefully we’ll go for one better.”