Simon Pagenaud (Penske, 22e) : “It’s a shame to have had to start this far. I really think Chevrolet provided us with an incredible engine for the race. There was so much power … If we had started a little higher, we wouldn’t have wasted so much time in traffic. I really feel like we had one of the best cars. I was outside of Ryan Hunter-Reay and he came up and touched my front wing like I wasn’t there. So we had to come back to the pit to put on a new fin and everything fell apart from there. At the end of the race, we were doing some of the fastest laps on the grid … The car was really really good and it would have been nice to be part of the final. It wasn’t our year. We will come back next year and we will be strong. We have a good base to tie up next year to try to get victory number 2. ”
Fernando Alonso (Arrow McLaren SP, 21e) : “It was a race of twists and turns for us. We haven’t had a single easy lap. At the beginning, we had a lot of trouble with the balance of the car, we had a lot of oversteer. We continued to work on this at each pit stop by removing downforce up front and adjusting the tires. I started to be happy with the car and then on lap 110, when we had spent half the race moving up from 26th to 15th place, we had a clutch problem that we couldn’t. not solve. I finished the race without a clutch and at each stop you had to push the car, put on a gear and go. It cost us a ride that we could never take back. I’m still happy to cross the finish line and have completed the 500 miles. This is the positive point. I am proud of the work we have done over the past two weeks. We tried during the race but the luck was not with us. ”
.
