Juncos Racing's Kyle Kaiser has dedicated the success of qualifying for the 103rd running of the Indianapolis 500 to his team after a giant-killing moment as he bumped out McLaren's Fernando Alonso.
Kaiser ran last out of the six drivers who had to contend in the last-row shootout to qualify for the race and narrowly beat Alonso's best-average lap speed by just 0.019mph, securing 33rd place on the grid.
Juncos, as one of the smallest outfits in the NTT IndyCar Series had to contend with financial difficulties after losing sponsors prior to the start of practice week, as well as having to overcome the loss of their primary car due to Kaiser's crash in 'Fast Friday' practice.
The team worked tirelessly overnight to prepare the road course car which he used in the IndyCar Classic at the Circuit of The Americas.
"I have to give the team pretty much all the credit here because they've been working super long nights," said Kaiser. "I think they had 40 straight hours of work trying to get that car together, getting us ready to practice the next day at 8:00 a.m.
"Obviously the backup car didn't have the same pace as our main car, but we didn't give up. This was just an amazing battle from their end, just looking for every little thing we could do, no matter what it was, sanding the car, just changing pieces, just doing everything possible to try and get the speed out of it.
"Even yesterday when I don't think we had a perfect first run, the balance wasn't quite what we were hoping, it was very difficult conditions, we rallied, we got the balance right later in the day with our other two runs even though the speed wasn't there, which I think paid off today.
"We felt like we didn't need to go out this morning. We had the balance where we wanted it, we got the data we needed yesterday and kind of stuck with our guns, and it really paid off."
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