Firestone Indy Lights: Kansas Lottery 100

Topics:  Kansas Lottery 100

Wade Cunningham
April 26, 2009

KANSAS CITY, KANSAS

THE MODERATOR: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our second-place finisher, Wade Cunningham, and our third-place finisher Mario Romancini.
Wade, you started on the pole position today. Tell us about your race, staying up front.
WADE CUNNINGHAM: The car felt pretty good off the bat. It was pretty difficult with the gearing, with the headwind especially to start with, with the full fuel. We were right in between gears. I felt like we could stay there for a while. On the first restart, might have been the second one, Sebastain got me. It was pretty clear he had a shorter second and third gear than I did. With the headwind, it made his car go that little bit better. He was able to get me. On the three or four, subsequent restarts, I just couldn't get the same kind of run on him. That was tough.
You know, I tried my best. We ran side-by-side a lot most of the time. A yellow came out. There were a lot of yellows today. But really we weren't fast enough to pass him. And the way the wind was blowing, it definitely made it difficult for third place to really get some air on the car. When Bea was behind me, she really wasn't much help as a teammate to push me past. It was the same when I was in third.
You know, it was a good result. Disappointed not to come away with the win. But really Sebastain has had the fastest car and he deserved to win.
THE MODERATOR: We will now open up the floor for questions.

Q. You talked about yesterday after qualifying you thought Sebastian's car was going to be one of the strongest ones. Did that become evident on the one long run, he was able to create a little bit of space?
WADE CUNNINGHAM: Yeah. We saw from practice yesterday that when people were running more race trim in their cars, he was the fast fastest car both sessions. Definitely in that long run with the swing sort of for second place, I thought myself and Mario, we had pretty similar cars in terms of outright speed. We were holding onto Sebastian's draft, punching a bit of a hole in there. That allowed the third place to battle with second. It was quite difficult to hold onto second. You were battling the understeer with the tailwind into three. That allowed the car behind to take advantage of that on corner exit.
So it was just a tough race. I don't think if we had stayed green for the checkered flag it really would have changed the result.

Q. Wade, the fact that the track was now clean, did that have a lot of effect? Was it slippery? Was it mainly the wind?
WADE CUNNINGHAM: The overall grip of the track was quite good. Wasn't a lot of side-by-side running in practice. As the race progressed, we were able to run two-wide quite easily through one and two. It was a little bit more difficult in three and four just because of the tailwinds. It was difficult to get the car set on entry. So, no, that wasn't really a factor. The tailwind was probably the biggest factor of the race.