Heading into a dry Toronto IndyCar qualifying session, even Christian Lundgaard didn’t envisage he would be in a fight to start on the front row, but his wet weather prowess earned him a second pole of the year.
“When I woke up this morning, I was just hoping we were going to make improvements from 17th yesterday!” said Rahal Letterman Lanigan driver Lundgaard after the session.
“To end the day like this I didn’t quite expect, but RLL has just been smashing it, quite honestly.
“I know the past few race weekends we’ve been moving forward, and we’ve been making progress.
“Let’s just see what the rest of the season brings. It starts well now, so we’ll keep moving.”
Tough conditions? No match for @lundgaardoff.#INDYCAR // #IndyTO pic.twitter.com/PvCErQNFJc
— NTT INDYCAR SERIES (@IndyCar) July 15, 2023
Coming from 17th in practice to pole in qualifying is not necessarily such a surprise, because it’s symbolic of one of Lundgaard’s best traits. The first trait his engineer Ben Siegel mentions when you ask where the former Alpine Formula 1 junior has been most impressive since his IndyCar switch.
“One of the things about Christian is he has a really positive attitude,” Siegel – who got his break working with Rubens Barrichello at KV Racing in 2012 and then moved to Ed Carpenter Racing before joining RLL for 2022 – tells The Race.
“Even when things aren’t really going well, he recovers from that very quickly, and always has kind of a positive outlook on the way things are going. So when he gets in the car, he’s giving it everything that he’s got every time and obviously, it works out!”
Lundgaard has been incredibly impressive in 2023. He’s the series’ fourth-best driver on road courses – despite having 13 cars from the top teams to compete against before you even consider RLL’s midfield rivals – and has comfortably been the team’s best scorer despite only being in his sophomore year.
He’s repeatedly shown better ability to adapt to Rahal’s fluctuating car performance and deliver top performances, Toronto being the latest in a long line of achievements marking him out as a future race winner and champion.
You don’t get as many wet weather specialists at the elite level anymore because everyone has to be good in the wet to be able to compete – probably in the same way big servers and serve and volley specialists don’t really exist in tennis anymore because you have to be an all-rounder to win.
But it’s clear Lundgaard has a knack for finding performance in not only wet conditions, but especially changing conditions, which is an art in itself.
“When we grew up in mini-karts in Denmark we don’t have wet tyres, and as we all know, we develop our skills when we are a very young age,” he said.
“I was driving around on the slicks in the wet, and I’ve just always been fast in the wet. Especially in go-karts. I guess it comes from there.”
Lundgaard had been one of the wise drivers to take a second set of wet tyres in Q2 – the Firestone wets become saturated and you can go faster with a fresh set even on a drying track – and then did a banker in the Fast Six on the wets before switching to softs on the drying track.
He credited his team for the call, saying his side of the RLL pit “made it happen today, I don’t think I did, I think they did”.
McLaren’s Pato O’Ward also took a second set of wets but then went early in the Fast Six, and you can see just how treacherous the track was from his early onboard below.
Mr. Fast Hands was SHOWING OUT in the Firestone Fast Six