After challenging qualifying session, Mazda Team Joest looks ahead to Sunday’s race

ELKHART LAKE, Wis. (August 4, 2018) – The pair of Mazda RT24-Ps that compete in the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship’s Prototype class will line up in sixth and eighth positions for Sunday afternoon’s Continental Tire Road Race Showcase at Road America.

Oliver Jarvis drove the No. 77 Castrol/ModSpace Mazda RT24-P to sixth position during Saturday afternoon’s qualifying session, while Harry Tincknell drove the No. 55 Mazda RT24-P to eighth on the grid. After Jarvis had put the Mazda RT24-P in first position in the first practice and third in the third practice, the team was looking for their best qualifying performance of the season since Jarvis qualified in third position at Mid-Ohio.

The Continental Tire Road Race Showcase will be shown live on Sunday, August 5 at 2:30 PM ET on FOX Sports 1.

Quotes
John Doonan, Director, Mazda Motorsports
“We have a good car for the race, a car that we feel will be good over the course of a stint and over the length of the race. I’m really proud of how the guys have been working together together – the drivers, the engineers, and our partners at Multimatic – since the Mazda RT24-Ps came off the trailer. Even though we aren’t starting exactly where we wanted to, we are all excited for the race to get started and to show what the team is capable of.” 

No. 55 Mazda RT24-P
Harry Tincknell
“We’ve definitely been chasing the setup a little bit since we rolled off the truck, but we had made progress and gone in the right direction before qualifying started. But we didn’t get it quite right in qualifying, the heat may have been a factor, so it’s just time to press on and be as ready as we can be for the race. It looks like it will be another warm day tomorrow, which will make things hard on the cars, the teams and the drivers, but we’ll be ready for anything the race will throw at us.”

No. 77 Castrol/ModSpace Mazda RT24-P
Oliver Jarvis
“It’s a shame that we weren’t able to get more out of the car in qualifying. We were pretty happy with the Mazda RT24-P during practice, as the times showed, but it appears we just missed the setup window when the temperature came up in the middle of the day. We’ll just have to put it behind us and prepare for tomorrow. We have a big job ahead of us from sixth position to get ahead of some very strong competition, but we have the team and the car to do it.”