PREMA Racing’s penultimate qualifying session of its rookie NTT INDYCAR Series season, held at the Milwaukee Mile, was challenging for both Robert Shwartzman and Callum Ilott.
Saturday’s action began with the first Free Practice session, where both drivers completed plenty of laps around the short oval.
Shwartzman ran fourth in the order of the 27 runners, with Ilott sixth. Both drivers had their grid position set by the average of their two laps.
During Shwartzman’s effort, he set speeds of 158.191 and 157.830 miles per hour to put together an average of 158.010mph.
Ilott’s run was challenging. He put in speeds of 156.813 and 156.108mph for an average of 156.460mph.
Once all the runners had put in their runs, Shwartzman was sat in 21st and Ilott 25th.
Due to penalties for other competitors, the pair will line up 20th and 23rd respectively for Sunday’s 250-lap race.
After qualifying, the team completed one further practice session, the final running before the race which begins at 14:20 Eastern Time.
#83 ROBERT SHWARTZMAN
"The team did a great step forward between Free Practice and qualifying so I’m quite happy. We need to keep going and keep improving the car. The most important thing is the race tomorrow, so we try to do our best that we can to be as fast and as competitive as possible; that's the main target for the weekend. We continue to make progress as rookies so I'm already happy. It's quite a different oval compared to the previous ones with the banking, so we struggled quite a bit in Free Practice and now in qualifying we made some steps so we need to continue in this direction."
#90 CALLUM ILOTT
"We tried something different with the setup ahead of qualifying to try and find some speed, and unfortunately it did not work out as hoped. This leaves us towards the back of the order for the race on Sunday. It is important that we make the most of the session after qualifying to find the best racecar for us to move forward."