IndyCar veteran Jimmy Kite admitted to being very disappointed at his failure to make the field for this year's Indianapolis 500, after being bumped from the line-up on Sunday by rookie Phil Giebler.
Kite and the PDM team were 'on the bubble' after fellow veteran Richie Hearn qualified the Hemelgarn/Racing Professionals car, and had no answer when Giebler also went faster.
"Even though we got to run a couple of days, it's been a long month," Kite sighed, "It doesn't seem two days ago Paul was calling me saying 'hey, you're my guy this month that's going to put the car in the 500'.
"After the accident on Wednesday, the guys worked their tails off to get that car back out there. We got out Friday, the thing was handling great, we knew it was locked down. We started trimming it out and trimming it out, but the speed we expected just wasn't there. It's not as if the car wasn't handling on me - or for me - and it's not as if the engineers weren't working their tails off. It's not as if I wasn't out there trying my hardest and running foot to the floor. It's like we found terminal velocity in the car and, no matter what we did, it just didn't handle real good down the straightaways."
Team boss Paul Diatlovich shared Kite's pain but, as yet, did not have a pointer to why the PDM car was so slow.
"It was definitely something that I missed in the initial set-up," he surmised, "We're going to probably do a post-mortem on the chassis tomorrow and then we'll find something. But it's something that, you know, I missed. Like I said, the crew was extraordinary. They did a marvellous job. We had a crash, we persevered, we went through, there were no real panics. They did everything I asked them to do, and it was me not telling them enough, I guess.
"Like I said, Jimmy Kite is a very good driver, and to have him sitting next to me explaining why we missed the show is.... If he never answers the phone from me again, I wouldn't blame him.
