Having been bumped out of eleventh place in the Indianapolis 500 qualifying order in the final hour of action on Pole Day, Graham Rahal will lead those still looking to secure a place in the field for the blue riband event when the second 'session' starts on Sunday.
The Newman/Haas/Lanigan rookie had been on the bubble for a while before Andretti Green's Hideki Mutoh put in a time good enough to take a place on row three and demote the #06 Hole in the Wall Camps Dallara to unlucky twelfth.
"We were pretty happy to be where we were for such a long period of time, but it's a shame - I really would have liked to be in today," Rahal sighed after missing the cut by one place and a tenth of a second over four laps, "We'd been doing runs in practice, and the car was a lot quicker than that speed. We went out again and had no speed, so I told them to wave it off because it wasn't very good. When the track gets cooler, sometimes you get more downforce, and the car goes slower."
Rahal also had the disappointment of seeing another attempt to reclaim his position disappear when his team pulled the #06 car out of line late in the day.
"I was ready to go because I thought we had new tyres on the thing," he commented, "I was excited to go out, and [Tomas] Scheckter lowered the bump speed so much that I think we could have made it. I think we were at about that speed on our last run, so it's pretty sad.
![Graham Rahal - Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing [pic credit: IRL/Payne]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/436622.jpg)
