Alexander Rossi took his second podium finish in three races as he finished third at Pocono Raceway on Sunday, but for a broken fuel trim knob he felt a win was there for the taking.
The Andretti Herta Autosport driver was a frontrunner all afternoon long and led a total of forty-four laps, but with the fuel mixture at a far from optimum level in the last third of the race, it left him unable to do anything about the Team Penske duo of Will Power and Josef Newgarden in the closing laps.
Despite this, Rossi was relatively happy with his afternoon at Pocono, but there was still a slight disappointment of a better result not coming thanks to the fuel mixture issue.
“A lot went right for us today,” said Rossi. “I think the Military-to-Motorsports car was strong and got right to the front from the beginning. It was our race to control from a fuel standpoint, and our NAPA Know How crew did a good job in the pits all day.
“The difficult thing was, our fuel trim knob came off two-thirds of the way through. So, we were stuck in the mix and it certainly wasn’t optimum. It made restarts challenging, and also definitely at the end when the two guys in front of me were pushing quite hard and I didn’t have full power.
“I was trying, but Josef didn’t have the speed for Will, and I didn’t really have the speed for Josef. I thought we were pretty strong in turn 3 at times, but I didn’t have enough to really pull alongside, and I think that was truly down to the (fuel) mixture problem.”