RYAN BRISCOE/No.6 Team Penske remained the fastest Indy Racing League IndyCar driver in Saturday morning’s practice for the 2009 Indianapolis 500 at The Brickyard. His teammate, HELIO CASTRONEVES/No.3 was second fastest.
Twenty-nine drivers were on course. Those who didn’t go out: STANTON BARRETT/No.98 CURB/Agajanian/Team 3G; and SCOTT SHARP/No.16 Panther Racing, whose car was severely damaged in Friday’s crash;
TONY KANAAN/No.11T Andretti Green Racing drove a cobbled together backup car in practice and will qualify it Saturday afternoon. In practice, it was multi-colored with graphics from his car and that of his AGR teammate, HIDEKI MUTOH/No.27.
ROBERT DOORNBOS/No.06T crashed early on in the morning’s practice, but he was able to be twelfth fastest – top Rookie in the session. He spun exiting Turn One and hit hard the Turn Two SAFER wall, severely damaging the front and left side of the car. He said “I have no idea (what happened.) I’m so disappointed. The guys did an amazing job getting the car ready. We had a good first outing. Everything felt good. We were just starting a run and rear just went on me. I don’t know what happened. We’ll have to look at the data, but it’s disappointing because I wanted to qualify today.”
Among the questions posed to ROGER PENSKE Friday during the Team Penske media conference was whether his Penske Automotive division would purchase Saturn. Penske said “Well, as I said in our analyst conference call last week, Saturn obviously is one of the divisions which General Motors is either going to sell or close down, and we have a distribution experience bringing the Smart Car into the United States – we had a two-step distribution system. We own Detroit Diesel. At this particular time we’ve made no offer to GM, we’re in a due diligence stage, and it’s a very short time frame. So at the moment lots of things have to play out before we’d make a formal bid.
“So I think the publicity is way ahead of the process.”