Catchfence

TORONTO, CAN July 17—Vitor Meira and the ABC Supply team will roll the dice tomorrow afternoon in the Honda Indy Toronto. They will have nothing to lose because Meira will start 26th due to a problem in the first round of qualifying today.

The disappointment was palpable for the ABC Supply team which had been 11^th quickest on the time sheet in the practice session earlier in the day.

“We have to figure out what happened in qualifying still,” said Meira. “Definitely something that affected the brakes a lot happened—we know it’s happening but we don’t know where it’s coming from yet. Before that everything was great, the car unloaded good, it was fast. I was able to learn the track fast, the car was up to it, the team’s doing a great job, we just have to find what went wrong in qualifying. There’s only one worst time to have a problem and that’s in the race. It’s going to be a tough day out there but in this position, it’s easy to gamble.”

After four laps in the 15-minute first round qualifying session, A.J. Foyt told Meira to pit for a new set of tires. Meira didn’t make it back to the pits however, sliding into a tire barrier in turn five. The ABC Supply car wasn’t damaged but because a full course caution was brought out (initially for Paul Tracy who spun and stopped in the middle of the track) moments before Meira went into the tire barrier, Meira and Tracy lost their two best laps from the entire session.

When Meira returned to the track with another set of new tires, there were just five minutes left in the session. The car was a little better but not where it’d been earlier in the day. And his two best laps which would have put him around 16^th were disallowed due to the caution coming out.

Justin Wilson won his first IZOD IndyCar Series pole position driving for the Dreyer-Reinbold team. The Honda Indy Toronto will be televised live by ABC-TV tomorrow afternoon starting at 12:30pm ET.

- A.J. Foyt Racing, Press Release