At the end of practice for the Firestone 600 at Texas Motor Speedway, Team Penske displayed that they still had the speed that led them to a 1-2 finish in the Indianapolis 500. Simon Pagenaud, the newest driver in Roger Penske’s quartet, topped the charts with a lap of 24.2307 seconds.
“It’s very stable, very good and traffic and very good on its own,” Pagenaud said. “We need to work tonight in practice, when it will be cooler like the race, we’ll try to make it even better. But this is a good start.”
Defending Series Champion Will Power was second quickest, 0.0052 seconds off of his teammate as he looks to bounce back following a wreck in Detroit. Takuma Sato carried the positive Detroit momentum over to post the third quickest time, showing that Honda has indeed started to close the gap between the pair of manufactures. Chip Ganassi Racing teammates Tony Kanaan and Scott Dixon rounded out the top-five.
Helio Castroneves was sixth, followed by Graham Rahal, Tristan Vautier, Marco Andretti and Carlos Munoz. Current points leader Juan Pablo Montoya was 16th.
Ryan Hunter-Reay would make contact with the SAFER barrier during the session about halfway through the session.
“Just got up in the dirty air and the car just turned around, but not sure why,” he said.
