After a brief delay, American rookie Bryan Clauson, who crashed Saturday, took his turn and qualified Sarah Fisher's second car at 214.455 — substantially slower than the speeds he had posted earlier this week. Clauson's addition gave the race 32 qualifiers.
"You know, obviously, when you have a run like we did yesterday at 223 and a half or so and come back today and go run that, you're not excited," said Clauson, who added a Band-Aid to the sidepod of his car Sunday. "But it's a product of just needing to get four laps in and putting something that was safe on the car and making sure we didn't have another incident like we did yesterday."
Clauson's run left Ed Carpenter, who was involved in a hard crash Saturday, as the only non-qualified driver left.
At 2:04, Carpenter ended any potential suspense by qualifying in 222.324.
Bourdais, of France, was Sunday's top qualifier at 223.760 and will start 25th. Had he posted that speed on Saturday, Bourdais would have been starting 15th.
The only blemish the rest on a rather dull afternoon Bump Day came when Kimball spun in the first turn and ended up in the outside wall. He was released later from the infield medical care center and cleared to drive.
"It's a massive relief after the week or two we've had," said Legge, Bourdais' teammate at Dragon Racing. "We haven't had time on track to work on qualifying setup or anything like that, so we needed to find a car that was easy to drive at this stage."
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