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Twin Ring Motegi Qualifying Report

A tough day at the track for Alex Tagliani

Montréal (September 18, 2010) – Things did not turn out the way FAZZT Race Team expected during qualifying for the Indy Japan 300 held Saturday at the 2.414-km Twin Ring Motegi egg-shaped oval track located 130 kilometers north of Tokyo in Japan as Alex Tagliani qualified 23rd for Sunday’s race. Second in line to qualify, Tagliani’s warm up lap was not up to pace leading the Canadian driver to post qualifying lap speeds of 314.451 km/h and 315.217 km/h for a combined time of 55.9844 seconds. He will start the race from row 12 next to Simona de Silvestro.

Alex-Tagliani-Motegi-2

 

“Today’s results were not quite what we were looking for in times,” Alex Tagliani said. “We were struggling a bit with understeer in the first practice session and although we made some positive changes for the second session we still needed to free up the car. The guys worked really hard to try to get the car to where we thought we wanted to be for qualifying but, unfortunately, we went too far. We just have to work that much harder tomorrow to make sure we have a good result for Bowers & Wilkins and TorcUP.”

Team Penske driver Helio Castroneves won his second pole of the 2010 IZOD IndyCar Series, his fourth in five years at the Twin Ring Motegi oval track with a combined two-lap qualifying time of 54.1803 seconds to edge his teammate Ryan Briscoe by a mere one tenth of a second. Third place went to point’s leader Will Power, also from Team Penske. Fourth quickest in the lone qualifying session was Dario Franchitti. Marco Andretti and Tony Kanaan, both driving for Andretti Autosport, will fill row three of the starting grid for the Japan Indy 300.

Round 16 of the 2010 IZOD IndyCar schedule is a 200-lap, 483 kilometers race that will be broadcast live Saturday night September 18 on TSN2 at 11:00 p.m., Eastern Time. Live Timing and Scoring as well as video coverage of the race are available at www.indycar.com.

Rob Edwards, FAZZT Race Team COO/General Manager:

“Considering that we qualified slower than we ran in the first practice session we are clearly very disappointed with where we are starting tomorrow’s race. The compressed schedule today did not allow any room for error and we were just too ambitious with the changes that we made for qualifying. I have every confidence in Alex and our engineers working through the data tonight to give us a good race car for tomorrow and we will hope for the chance to execute a strategy to move up through the field.”

The image is courtesy of the IndyCar Series / Ron McQueeney

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