Power takes opening round of 2014 Chevrolet Indy Dual in Detroit

CHEVROLET INDY DUAL IN DETROIT PRESENTED BY QUICKEN LOANS POST-RACE QUOTES:

WILL POWER (No. 12 Verizon Team Penske Chevrolet): “Just a great job by the team, putting me in a position to use our speed. That was hard work, very hard work. I’m very exhausted. It’s a massive win. It’s a massive win for me, massive win for the team and especially for Roger (Penske) and for Chevy. They’ve been trying to win here for a long time and we finally did it with a Honda trying to charge by.” (About the late challenge from Graham Rahal): “(Rahal) was really pushing me at the end and it was a great victory for Roger, the (crew) guys and Verizon.”

GRAHAM RAHAL (No. 15 National Guard Honda): “For us this entire National Guard team to get a result like this, you don’t know what it means. We’ve been fighting awfully hard to just finish where we have been finishing and so to finally get a result like this it means more than words. As we look forward to tomorrow, I think we can do one better. I really do. And we’ve really learned a lot today and a lot that is going to help us tomorrow.” (About the end of the race) “I was just trying to give him a run for his money. You know, I was just trying to get close enough where I could challenge him. We were pretty close. Didn’t quite get there but I’m very proud of this team. The car was phenomenal. We’re going to tweak it a little bit for tomorrow and we’ll be better…I thought if I can just force him into a little mistake, this is mine. And that’s all I was trying to do.”

TONY KANAAN (No. 10 Energizer Chevrolet): “The team did a great job. I’ve got to thank the Energizer Target guys. But you can’t be happy finishing third. We want to win so we’re working towards that. It was a great race for us. We got great restarts, great pit stops, plus the strategy played out in our favor big time. So we have tonight to work on it and tomorrow I want to put that thing in P1. That’s for sure. You know the Energizer car has a pretty good history of winning with Dixon and Dario, so I’ve got to keep it up.”

SEBASTIEN BOURDAIS (No. 11 Mistic KVSH Racing Chevrolet): “It was a tough day for the Mistic E-Cigs team. We did couple of things that obviously didn’t work out. First of all the fuel mileage was not the same on my dash as on the timing stand, so I thought I was doing the mileage and on the timing stand I wasn’t, so I had to do extra stops. After the second stop there was just nothing under me when I was supposed to be able to go fast in clean air. It felt like the car was broken and something was wrong with it. That pretty much ruined the race. I don’t know because at the end of the race the car came back half decent, so I have no idea what happened. The car was very up and down all race. We kept trying, but it has been a tough day for the team.”

MIKE CONWAY (No. 20 Fuzzy’s Vodka/Ed Carpenter Racing Chevrolet): “It is a tough deal. I was saving fuel like we wanted early in the race. I was on the black tires and the three in front of me were on reds. I wanted to pressure them into a mistake. I could see James was sliding and caught it a couple of times. I felt I could pressure him into a mistake. I got into turn 12 a little late and the car couldn’t turn. I clipped the outside wall pretty hard. The boys are working hard to fix and get us back out. I’d like to check out the car before tomorrow’s qualifying. I feel bad for the Fuzzy’s team. I was trying too hard there.”

CARLOS HUERTAS (No. 18 Dale Coyne Racing Honda): “I am happy to get another top ten finish this year. The end was really tough because I had to save fuel and defend positions. I had to keep turning the engine down all of the time for less power and more fuel mileage and I was still not getting the numbers. It was difficult because I was running in the top five but that is what it is. I am hopeful we can improve on eighth place tomorrow. We can still improve the car and try to get better balance on both tires and overall just gain a bit more grip. The red tires were actually surprisingly good for me. I think I managed to hold the tires pretty well but the balance wasn’t perfect.”

RYAN BRISCOE (No. 8 NTT DATA Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet): “Today was just a really disappointing day for NTT DATA Chip Ganassi Racing. We had a good qualifying session this morning and were able to get into fifth to start the race. We worked our way all the way up to first and our gap was big enough that we figured I’d be able to come back out in third. We were literally about to pit when that last yellow came out. Once that happened and the field bunched up again, there was no way I was going to be able to come back out in the top three. We have a great car in the No. 8 NTT DATA Chevrolet, we just seem to keep running into bad luck. We’ll be ready tomorrow though, especially since we know how good we can be here.”

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