PREMA Racing's NTT INDYCAR SERIES drivers Callum Ilott and Robert Shwartzman will fight back from the rear of the field in Sunday’s Grand Prix of Monterey after both faced a difficult qualifying session.
Ilott and Shwartzman were able to get some good running in during Friday’s practice, however the second of the two sessions was cancelled on Saturday morning due to weather conditions.
The skies cleared ahead of qualifying and the two PREMA Racing drivers were in separate groups. Shwartzman was in the first, beginning on the softer Firestone tires. He showed good pace in the first half of the segment, sitting in third.
As the session continued, he was unable to improve his lap time and ultimately finished 13th.
Meanwhile in the second group, Ilott started on the harder Firestone tires and initially put himself into the top six. After switching to the soft tire, Ilott was one of the first to begin his final push lap.
He set a quicker lap time, but as the track continued to improve for other drivers, he missed out on transferring into the next segment, ending the session 12th.
With possible weather constraints in the area on Sunday, the 30-minute warmup will now take place at 19:00 ET on Saturday. The green flag will drop for the 95-lap race tomorrow at 15:22 ET.
#83 ROBERT SHWARTZMAN
"The session was quite odd. With the first set of soft tires it seemed to be quite good, but then when we went out with the second set we had to abort the first lap due to traffic and after that I had a lot less grip. We’ll try to figure out with the team what went wrong and whether we can make improvements in the race tomorrow. Hopefully we can find something that can help us and bring more pace. If there is going to be degradation, then maybe we can take advantage of it."
#90 CALLUM ILOTT
"It was a bit of a weird session for us here at Laguna. I felt good on the harder tires, and we were quickest on those, but then we put the softs on and I just didn’t have the rear grip that I expected. I didn’t really improve between the two sets of tires, whereas yesterday we were able to find two seconds so there was a bit of a difference. It’s going to be a long race tomorrow though, hopefully with a bit of degradation and we can move forwards. We’ll put our heads together tonight and think ahead of the race."