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| Under bright, sunny skies, Vancouver race fans were treated to an exhilarating 45-minute-Atlantic Qualifying session on the streets of Vancouver, the site of the tomorrow’s Molson Indy. Only four minutes into the session, the red flag appeared as provisional pole sitter and current Championship leader Hoover Orsi made hard contact into the wall in turn 8. Fortunately, Hoover was all right. The session restarted at the seventh minute and ran until the end without incident. Looking to improve on yesterday’s provisional qualifying result, Jonathan Macri (P1 – Racing/NTN Bearings Swift), was unable to better his position, and in fact lost a place finishing 7th by the checkered flag with a lap time of 1:11.400. Midway into the session, Jonathan ran as high as 2nd. However, times began to fall significantly in the second half of the qualifying session as is normally the case as tires heat up, allowing drivers to find more grip and push harder. Jonathan fell to 9th but than responded with 5 minutes remaining in the session, climbing to 7th place. Jonathan attempted to improve his grid position. However a broken differential ended his session. “I was looking to better my time today”, Jonathan said. We probably spent too much time trying to get the right set up, and this cut into my track time. Ideally, most of the time should have been spent on the track qualifying. It takes a while to get into a rhythm on the track before you push hard for your fast lap. I went out the last 5 minutes of the session and gained a few places. I wanted to put in a few more laps, but, unfortunately, the transmission input shaft broke. Oh well. It’s expected. I mean, we’ve gone a whole season without a breakage, so we’ve been lucky up until now. Actually, we’ve even been pretty lucky now considering that the breakage could have happened during the race tomorrow. Anyway, we’re going to work hard to try to make a few key adjustments to the car’s set-up. Hopefully, we’ll square out a few bugs and be in good shape for tomorrow.” Hoover Orsi maintained the pole position with his record setting time of 1:09.759 seconds. Joey Hand and David Rutledge will start 2nd and 3rd respectively tomorrow. Atlantic drivers will descend on the Vancouver road course tomorrow at 9:20 am PDT to warm up for the 38-lap race scheduled for late morning at 11:15 am PDT. No doubt, Jonathan will be in tight for tomorrow’s race. Surely, he would have welcomed a better start grid position – this is what he was gunning for today. However, though Jonathan is in 8th place overall, he is separated from pole sitter Hoover Orsi by just a little over 1 second. Yes, Macri will definitely have to fight hard tomorrow, but he is quick and a good start and some hard, aggressive driving, coupled with the will to fully exhaust and capitalize on those few passing opportunities allowed by the tight Vancouver road course, should see Jonathan come away with excellent results. Report by Fedele Fortino |
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