Benjamin Pedersen will start 23rd, an improvement over recent qualifying attempts, but he anticipated a stronger run. His lap time of 1 minute, 7.7583 seconds (118.905 mph) was the quickest of the weekend for him.
“We’ll be rolling off P23. We lost a bit of relative pace compared to practice so we’re going to look into that as to why that was,” Pedersen said, adding, “But both cars will be starting pretty close to each other so looking to finish the year as strong as possible and go forward. It looks like it’s pretty challenging to pass so it will be interesting with strategy what we can come up with, but we’ll be definitely giving it everything we have tomorrow to finish the season strong.”
Asked what makes passing even more difficult with the repaving of the 11-turn, 2.238-mile road course track, he explained, “I think it’s the nature of the track especially now with the new pavement and how much faster the cars are going. That makes it even harder to follow closely so I think it will be really interesting. I don’t think the tire deg [degradation] is going to be bad either so I think for everyone it’s going to be a matter of not making any mistakes in the race.”