Indianapolis, Ind. (August 27, 2018) The Bommarito 500, the final oval-track race of the 2018 Verizon IndyCar season, was held this weekend at Gateway Motorsports Park. The #88 Harding Racing Chevrolet was quick along the 1.25-mile track during Friday practice and throughout the Saturday night event.
After starting 19th, Chaves ran consistently on pace with the leaders, charging to 11th by lap 65. An unscheduled pit stop resulted in an 18th place finish at the end of the race.
“I’m really gutted tonight because we had a really fantastic and competitive race car,” said Gabby Chaves. “We worked our way on track and we easily should have been a top ten finish car. I’m not sure what happened, I think it was into our third or fourth stint. Everything was fine, I went into turn one and felt the car bottom out a little bit and just went completely straight off the track, came off the corner, and had a lot of slack on the wheel. I thought that something was for sure damaged. Unfortunately, I came into the pits and we looked at it and didn’t find anything, so I went back out to finish the race. We had such a good car, I’m really gutted how it ended because it could have been so much better.”
“The most encouraging thing coming out of St. Louis is that it was our best race weekend in terms of the most competitive car that we’ve had from the beginning of the weekend through the end of the race,” said Brian Barnhart. “The car was fast off the trailer. It’s unfortunate we didn’t get to qualify due to a rain out and had to start by points and that put us further back than we think we could have qualified. Even so, Gabby moved up from 19th to 11th fairly early in the race and clearly had a good race car. He was running very competitive lap times with the top five cars of the race track. Unfortunately, we had a lengthy pit stop, inspecting the car as Gabby felt he had run over something on the race track and perhaps broken something on the car. By the time we had the opportunity to inspect, we had lost several laps and that’s where we finished the day. Again, the encouraging thing is that the car throughout the entire weekend was probably the most competitive we’ve had all season long and for that we’re looking forward to Portland.”
The Verizon IndyCar Series team will travel west for the Grand Prix of Portland at Portland International Raceway. Teams will begin the weekend testing on Thursday, with official practice starting on Friday at 10:45 a.m. PT. NBC Sports will broadcast qualifying live from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. PT on Saturday. Green flag will be Sunday, September 2 at 12:09 p.m. PT.
