"What They're Saying" from Chevrolet Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix Dual 1 Qualifying

Simon Pagenaud (No. 22 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Chevrolet): "The track is awesome. It's a real street fight out there. The No. 22 car was amazing with HP (Hewlett Packard), back on board with us. A lot of them are here this weekend so I'm glad we could do well for them. The team's just doing incredible and I'm glad we could keep the momentum going. Last week wasn't exactly what we wanted, but we're back. We were really strong during the race at the 500 but it is what it is, you can't always be up there. But, certainly, an awesome feeling today. What a cool track."

Helio Castroneves (No. 3 Hitachi Team Penske Chevrolet): "The boys did an unbelievable job. Simon (Pagenaud) just nipped me over there. But when I looked at the time and it was just one hundredth (of a second), oh, man, I would have squeezed a little something out there. But great job for the entire organization. (Race Engineer) Jonathan (Diuguid) gave me a phenomenal car since we started here this morning. I can't believe it. So close to get the number one spot. But that's okay."

Juan Pablo Montoya (No. 2 Verizon Team Penske Chevrolet): "It was really good to be honest with you. Our Verizon Chevy has been pretty good. We actually struggled a lot this morning. You look at how fast our teammates were, I was like 13th or 15th this morning, so we pretty much changed everything on the car, and it worked well. I mean, we felt we needed to do a lot of changes, and it worked pretty well." 

James Hinchcliffe (No. 5 Arrow Schmidt Peterson Motorsports Honda): "I'm really happy with qualifying. To get into the Firestone Fast Six two (road/street) races in a row is big for the Arrow Electronics team. Some of the other cars were really quick, but we managed to have enough there at the end of the second round and then a solid effort in the third round to put it on the second row. I'm very pleased with that and it gives us a good starting spot for tomorrow's race, but it's only half the job. We still have two races and another qualifying to go, but to come back here after missing last year and be able to get up to speed quickly, I can't thank (race engineer) Allen (McDonald) and the crew enough. The Arrow car was great off the truck and it's just allowing us to keep this momentum going."

Carlos Munoz (No. 26 Magneti Marelli Honda): "I brushed the wall in Q2, and that held the car a lot for the Fast Six. We tried some stuff for the Fast Six, and it didn't work, but it's my first Fast Six with that like normal conditions, so just really happy. I was the best of the team, so I think it's a good position to start the race. I was here last year on the wet, and I think it's a good position to start the race. I think we still have work to do. I think I got everything out of the car. I think that was the limit. We saw that Team Penske was really strong here. We'll have to work a little bit more for tomorrow, practice."

Scott Dixon (No. 9 Target Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet): "We had a bit of a throttle sensor issue that hampered us, so I think there is still some good speed left in the Target car, so that is encouraging. It was a good start to the weekend for us and the team, so we'll go back and do some more homework and hope to improve our position for the race tomorrow."

Tony Kanaan (No. 10 NTT Data Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet): "The No. 10 NTT DATA Chevrolet was definitely a Firestone Fast Six car, but I made a mistake on my fast lap that lost us a tenth of a second, which was enough to put me out of the top six. On the bright side though, we'll have better tires for the race tomorrow when these other guys are using another set of reds in the last qualifying session. Great job by the team getting the car ready for qualifying. We struggled quite a bit in practice this morning, so I'm just happy with the major improvements we made from practice to qualifying."

Charlie Kimball (No. 42 Tresiba Chevrolet):"Frankly I'm really happy with the bounce back from the No. 83 team. We had a few different gremlins this morning - just things we haven't ever seen before that we needed to deal with before qualifying. Overall I'm very happy to come away starting on the fourth row. I think we have a good opportunity to make moves forward during tomorrow's race and hopefully we can learn something from today's qualifying that we can take away for qualifying for Sunday's race."

Will Power (No. 12 Verizon Team Penske Chevrolet): "We were so quick this morning in practice than in qualifying. The Verizon Chevy touched the wall early on in qualifying, so we had to change the suspension. It was pretty intense out there. Wasn't quite the result we had hoped for. We'll just have to go into the race tomorrow and see what we can do."

Graham Rahal (No. 15 United Rentals Honda): "Getting a good balance is a challenging thing here. We had an unfortunate situation in qualifying as well. The bumps are so bad here that my left side seat belt actually came undone in both rounds, so we had to be pretty cautious because of that. I don't know why that's happening but the bumps between Turns 2 and 3 are so severe, the seatbelt is having an issue. We've got to make sure that doesn't happen again. My (car) balance on the black Firestone is really good, but my balance on the reds just isn't very good so we've got a little bit of work to do there. Ultimately, on the blacks on the long run, the United Rentals car is very, very competitive so I feel pretty good going into tomorrow."

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