James Davison got out on track for the first time this month of May during Monday’s practice session at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway as he got up to pace in the backup Dale Coyne Racing machine.
The Australian was chosen to replace the injured Sebastien Bourdais after the Frenchman suffered a horror crash during qualifying last Saturday, and completed 88 laps and set a best lap of 223.670mph despite it being the road course backup car with minimal superspeedway configurations.
Davison only has one hour more of testing to get a better feeling behind the wheel before taking the green flag, with the thirty-year-old joining the rest of the field in the practice session on Carb Day on Friday.
“We’re running a road course backup car (that has been transformed to superspeedway configuration),” said Davison. “We knew we weren’t going to be particularly quick, but we just needed to try to get the car to handle well with a lot of cars in front of us obviously. We’re starting 33rd.
“We tried a number of things as the day went on. I would say it wasn’t the right direction, but we’re smarter from it now. We’ll just try and go another step forward with the car on Carb Day.”