MADISON, Ill. — Christian Rasmussen signed a contract extension with ECR last week and on Sunday night produced his best finish of the NTT IndyCar Series season.
Rasmussen started 19th and blasted through traffic to finish third at World Wide Technology Raceway. It was his first top-10 finish of the campaign.
Ironically, an ill-handling car led to Rasmussen putting his No. 21 Chevrolet into the high groove of the 1.25-mile race track. And that’s where his race took off.
“That’s what the car was giving me the whole race,” Rasmussen said. “I tried to run down low starting the race. Man, the car was just so tight that I couldn’t turn. I got chewed up like by everyone out of turn two. I was like, ‘Well, got to try and fix this.’
“Moved the car up the track a little bit and it worked a lot better. Then the side product of that is you can kind of pass cars up there. That’s when we started moving forward. Yeah, that’s where the car was happy.”
The 25-year-old Dane said he ran that line out of necessity.
“I was kind of forced to do that,” he said. “Even when Marcus was coming up behind me, I could see that he was running the low line on the exit of two. I wanted to do that as well, to try and take some air off his wing. That would set me up even worse because I was dead slow down there.
“I was kind of forced to the high line the whole race. But man, it worked out all right.”
It’s not the first time Rasmussen has found success racing through traffic on a short oval, including winning at The Milwaukee Mile last August.
“Well, all of those things is kind of what it takes to make it up to the podium positions, right? No matter what you want to be able to move forward on a short oval,” Rasmussen said. “I think if you can run and put the car kind of wherever the car in front of you is not driving, you’re in a pretty good spot.
“Obviously, we are not qualifying as well as we want to. We’re ever so slightly missing the balance in qualifying. We need to do some work to try and improve that so we don’t have to make it that hard on ourselves every single time.
“But it’s also good to know that when we are in this position, we do have a tough qualifying, that we can still get away with these results.”
