Teammates Newgarden, Carpenter Qualify Next To Each Other For Saturday Night Race

(FORT WORTH, Ind.) June 5, 2015 – Qualifying Notes

– Qualifications have been completed for Saturday night’s Firestone 600 at Texas Motor Speedway. Josef Newgarden will start 14th in tomorrow’s 248-lap event while Ed Carpenter will roll off one position away in 15th.

– Both drivers struggled with grip in the one hour and 15 minute practice session this morning, but made significant strides in qualifying. Newgarden and Carpenter both turned laps over six miles per hour faster than their best practice lap.

– Practice for the Firestone 600 will continue this evening with one more half an hour session. It will be the last practice session before tomorrow night’s event.

– CFH Racing is the defending race winning team at Texas Motor Speedway. Team co-owner Ed Carpenter claimed the victory in last year’s race, leading 66 of the final 67 laps and 90 laps total. It was the third win of Carpenter’s Verizon IndyCar Series career.

– Newgarden has competed in three races at the 1.5-mile oval outside of Fort Worth, Texas; Carpenter has 13 career starts at TMS, including four Top 10 finishes.

– Saturday night will mark Carpenter’s second race of the 2015 season. He drives the No. 20 Fuzzy’s Award Winning Vodka Chevrolet in the oval races, handing the car over to Luca Filippi for the road and street course events. Carpenter raced in the Indianapolis 500 two weeks ago, starting 12th and finishing 30th after contact with another car sent him into the wall. He is the only owner/driver competing in the Verizon IndyCar Series.

– The 24-year-old Newgarden is having the best season of his IndyCar career, claiming five Top 10 finishes in the first eight races of the year. He also captured his first career victory in late April at Barber Motorsports Park. Newgarden sits 8th in the championship point standings at the halfway point in the season.

– The Firestone 600 is the fourth in a string of five back-to-back races, including a double-header event featuring two races at the Belle Isle Park street circuit in Detroit last weekend. This will be the 9th straight weekend of on-track activity for the Speedway, Ind.-based team.

– The 2015 Firestone 600 will take place at 8 p.m. ET on Saturday, June 6, currently scheduled to be broadcast live on NBC Sports Network. The race will feature 248 laps with the green flag scheduled for 8:50 p.m. ET.

ED CARPENTER, NO. 20 FUZZY’S VODKA CHEVROLET, QUALIFIED 15TH: “It’s not a speed problem for us, we know how to make the cars go fast. However, it’s hard to do that when the car does not handle well as well as we know it can. We have to figure out how to make this new car work with this new package. We haven’t done a good enough job of that up to this point but we will keep working on it.”

JOSEF NEWGARDEN, NO. 67 HARTMAN OIL CHEVROLET, QUALIFIED 14TH: “This morning we were probably the only team that did not do a qualification simulation run, that’s why we appeared to jump up quite a bit in our qualifying times. It’s still not good enough, we’re not where we need to be. It was hard to make up any ground with only a one hour session and then qualifying. We have another half an hour practice tonight to keep working on it. We’ll keep fighting, we’ve got a great team at CFH Racing. It’s a long night tomorrow, we’re going to put our heads down and see what we can get out of it.”