Vitor Meira Race Quotations

We had a vibration with the car after the second practice today. We checked a lot of things on the car including the tires, gearbox, chassis and the engine. Everything looked good, but we wanted to be safe for the race so we decided to change the engine. That way we are ready for warm-up and the race. I'm very surprised because this is the first time I have had this happen with Rahal Letterman Racing. We can work out some more things in warm-up and the car will be set to go. The car felt very good in traffic in the practice. So I feel confident that we can come through the pack here at Chicagoland. Some other tracks you couldn't do, that but here it is possible.

My goal coming into this season was to win my first race and I still haven't accomplished that, ... Our cars will be good at California and it would be a great way to finish the season with a victory. I think we'll be in the hunt right to the end.

We worked on our race settings during practice, ... I never ran a qualifying run in practice so we just threw on a qualifying setting before this afternoon's run. The race is the important thing here. Sure, we would like to qualify on the pole but it doesn't matter here. You can win the race from anywhere on the grid. We think we have a good race car and that is the key for Sunday. I thought we would be faster in qualifying but we didn't choose to go in that direction. We'll be ready for the race.

We had to go out second and that is a little bit of a question mark since the weather changed so much. You never know what will happen with the cool temperatures and the wind, but I was flat on the throttle. It felt pretty good. We did some race setups this morning and the car seems to be very good for the race. Rahal Letterman Racing had enough data coming into qualifying that we were not too surprised by the conditions. I got some information from Buddy after the last practice when the wind was really strong. Overall we had a strong run. Of course, we would obviously like to be faster.

The hardest thing for us was being proactive and making the proper changes for these conditions. Now we will have to do the same for the race and the race will be much different.

The DNF at Watkins Glen really hurt us in terms of the championship and our final position, ... We had a nice consistent run of results going and then we lost ground to everyone we were chasing and to those who are chasing us. You can't worry about where this driver or that driver is during the race. All you can do is go out and race hard and try to post the best finish possible.