Q: How important is it to be in the top 11 on day one? How greedy would you be to take a car back out there to get into the top 11?
"I think everyone here knows that if you are in the top 11 you sleep a lot better on Saturday night. There is pride that is in there, but the bottom line is getting yourself in position to win the race. Most of the winners come from the top three or four rows. It certainly puts you in a much better position at the start so that you can get to the end.
"Any time you withdraw a time, it is a tough decision to make. I've had to do that myself. To have to talk to Brian and tell him that you are taking your time off the board is a tough decision to make whether you are eighth, seventh, second, third. It has a lot to do with the run you made. Was that run the best you could do or is there more that you hoped for. It's a risk-reward type of program here. Any time you take a time off of the board, you have to know that anything can happen. It all comes down to what is realistic for your situation and being part of that top 11."
MIKE HULL (Team managing director, Target Chip Ganassi Racing):
"We've talked about it a lot, to be very honest. The last three or four weeks we've devoted some time to it, Chip (Ganassi) and the engineers, the managers. We talked about it. There's a lot of things that can happen. Probably the thing that we have to be very careful about and mindful of, even before qualifying begins, is the 35-tire rule. If you think about what a team is going to have to do to qualify for the Indy 500 - normally, what you do if you're not quite fast enough or you want to be faster is you always wait for the racetrack to re-open, and then you go out and make sure you're right. That's a set of tyres. It might be two sets of tyres. You get in line, that's another set of tyres. You might have already made an attempt. That's another set of tyres. So on the first day, you have an allotment of 35 sets of tyres for the entire month, which to most people seems like an enormous pile of tyres, you've used a good percentage of your tyres just trying to get into the race, and you might not get in the first day. If you're not lucky enough to be one of the chosen 11 on the first day and you've got to start that
