Rahal has pace despite blown engine

Graham Rahal is encouraged by his pace on the opening day of Indy 500 practice, despite his track time being cut short by an engine failure.

Rahal was forced into the garage when his Honda unit let go inside the final hour of running time, but his 224.407mph best was still good enough for sixth-fastest overall.

"We had a good and bad day," he said. "I think the car has a lot of pace and is fast. Obviously, to lose an engine is frustrating but I know the Honda guys are pushing these things as hard as they can. I would have liked to be a little better but we are struggling a little bit in traffic. But it's early days and we can't panic. She's in one piece, we going to change the engine and fire it up tomorrow.

"We didn't get everything done that we wanted too today. We wanted to only run a limited amount of tires today, so we didn't run much – only two sets, and not even fully two sets. We tried to save them up for later."

Oriol Servia put the second Rahal Letterman Lanigan car 11th-fastest for the day at 223.547mph.