Rasmussen exceeds expectations for ECR in Mid-Ohio qualifying

Christian Rasmussen reset his career-best qualifying performance on Saturday at Mid-Ohio as one of a few young IndyCar stars to perform well above expectations in road course qualifying.

His ECR team is mostly praised for its high output on ovals, and that’s been part of a season-long rewrite by Rasmussen, who qualified eighth at Arlington and ninth at Detroit before lowering his best starting position to fifth for Sunday’s Honda Indy 200.

The 2023 Indy NXT champion is more than capable of impressing at every type of track, and with ECR making considerable strides on road and street courses, Rasmussen has a chance to feature in the race from inside the No. 21 Chevy.

“That was pretty good!” Rasmussen said. “America’s birthday brought some good things for us here. Starting fifth at Mid-Ohio is my best start in the IndyCar Series to date and also my first Firestone Fast 6 appearance. I can’t believe it’s taken us this long, but now that monkey is off our back! We’re going into tomorrow confident, and we’ll see what we can do. We’re excited. The No. 21 Splenda Chevrolet is a good race car!”

Teammate Alexander Rossi wasn’t as fortunate in the No. 20 Chevy, but is encouraged with ECR’s rising level of competitiveness.

“We have made a lot of progress,” he said after locking in 18th. “We only ran one set of the alternate tires there because we used a set in Practice 2. The time we did was good enough to advance in Group 1, so we decided to save a set for Round 2 and get higher into the Top 10. It was an aggressive decision to sit on the time, and it wasn’t good enough by six hundredths of a second.

"The No. 20 Java House Chevrolet was infinitely better than it has been in all of the session leading up to qualifying. We’ve made progress on both cars and we’ve all worked really well together to evolve as the weekend has went on. I'm much more confident after that session than I have been all weekend, despite the result."