PREMA Racing continued its debut season in the NTT INDYCAR SERIES by executing a race without issue at the Grand Prix of Long Beach.
Robert Shwartzman and Callum Ilott navigated the 90-lap race between the walls, which went without a single caution period, without any trouble.
With the softer of the Firestone tires proving to be very difficult to maintain for a long period, all teams opted for a three-stop strategy.
The two PREMA drivers started on different tires, with Shwartzman on the harder compound and Ilott on the softs.
Drivers chose to get rid of the softer tires as early as lap one, with Ilott getting seven laps out of his before keeping to the hards until the finish in a similar strategy to much of the field.
Shwartzman meanwhile went for the softs for his third stint and ran hards through the rest of the race on an alternative strategy.
Ilott spent much of his race battling with Louis Foster and Conor Daly, before spending the end of the race between Graham Rahal and Christian Rasmussen, taking the chequered flag in 21st after a late move on Rahal.
Shwartzman’s aggressive strategy paid off nicely, and he moved up a few places from his starting position to finish in 18th just behind David Malukas for the team’s best result to date.
The team made six clean pitstops and delivered a good strategy with both cars in a very fast and challenging race, showcasing the continued growth being made in the early stages of this project.
The NTT INDYCAR SERIES heads to its second road course of the season at Barber Motorsports Park on May 2-4, kicking off a frenetic month of action including PREMA’s Indianapolis 500 debut.
#83 - Robert Shwartzman
“Overall, I'm quite happy with how the race went today. My target was to reach the top 20, so we achieved that by finishing P18. The issues in qualifying yesterday put us quite behind but the pace today was really good. It seems that, step by step, we're making the car better, so thank you to the team for their efforts. I saw today a step forward in terms of car performance, strategy and pitstops as well. Overall, we showed that the whole structure has started to improve so it's very positive and I'm happy. Now we have a short break but before we’ll go straight to Gateway for an oval test and then to Indianapolis. We will just keep working but, step by step, we're improving.”
#90 - Callum Ilott
"It was not a very eventful race, and we’ve had two fully green-flag races in a row now. From our side, it wasn't too bad. It probably was not the optimal strategy, but we had a lot of little issues that we were working through the race with that I needed to try and fix. We were consistent throughout. At the end of the day, we got the car home, but we have a lot of things that we need to look at on and off the track. It’s a part of it; we're still growing and it's good to have both cars at least getting closer and closer."