Pagenaud back to his best, says Bretzman

Although Pagenaud finished second in the opening round at St. Petersburg, he qualified only 14^th after struggling with the car’s setup, and he was unable to mount a challenge to winner Sebastien Bourdais. However Bretzman said that the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach had seen Pagenaud at his best, even though he had to start from the rear of the grid, having had his best qualifying times deleted for ‘interference’ with teammate Helio Castroneves’ warm-up lap in qualifying.

“We were plenty fast,” Bretzman told Motorsport.com, “and I only wish we’d been allowed to show it on Saturday.

“We got a puncture in the second stint and pitted four laps early, which meant saving fuel in the next stint, so we lost touch with the guys in front. Otherwise we might have finished third; we were running ahead of Josef [Newgarden, eventual third-place finisher] so probably third was about right. I don’t know if we’d have gotten close enough to [Sebastien] Bourdais to get second, but a podium was on.

But we didn’t need a yellow to help us get back up front; Simon was aggressive, he was working hard. The tires had a ton of pickup, I think because of all the different rubber that was down [from the support races], and those marbles are why you didn’t really see much passing at the end. You just couldn’t get too aggressive.”

Bretzman said that the team had had to react very fast to the puncture – an unexplained slash in the left-rear tire – which is why Race Control imposed a monetary fine for ‘unattended equipment’ in the pitbox during the emergency stop on Lap 31.

“Simon came out of Turn 8 saying something felt weird on the car,” said Bretzman, “and I looked at the data and the aero balance looked fine, and then I looked again and saw the air pressure was dropping really quick. It was down to 7psi.

“The crew suddenly had to scramble, falling over the pitwall, all elbows and equipment flying, so he could come straight out of Turn 11 and into the pits. Getting that done on the same lap as he reported it was our savior.

“So yeah, after that kind of thing and starting from the back, we’ll take fifth place. Like we talked about all last year, if you can make bad days produce fifth places, it’s good.

“And he’s back, he’s definitely back. We saw it in practice on Saturday morning. He’s very much in the form he was at the end of last season. It took a race weekend to get back to where he was, revving again, so it should be fun to watch.

“We need to be on top of our game against Honda teams; they’ve really stepped their game up and it’s going to be a good battle. It’s funny how you don’t want the competition, you want to beat them all the time, but then you remember that the competition is fun, it’s what racing is all about and you value your successes more.”