WEST ALLIS, Wis. — After qualifying on Saturday (Aug. 31), it looked it was going to be a rough weekend for Christian Lundgaard.
Instead, he picked up his fifth top 10 of the year, finishing ninth in the first race of the Hy-Vee Milwaukee Mile 250s at Milwaukee Mile on Saturday evening.
“I’ll say I’m satisfied with the result and how we got there,” Lundgaard told Frontstretch. “It wasn’t quite on pure performance.”
Lundgaard qualified in 26th earlier Saturday. Things looked grim for the Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing cars, as they occupied three of the last four starting spots on the grid.
The Denmark driver ran around that position for most of the early goings, not cracking the top 20 until lap 93 of the 250-lap event. Still, Lundgaard never climbed higher than 18th in the running order.
But his entire race changed with the wave of one yellow flag.
Most of the field pitted for routine pit stops around laps 184-186. However, Lundgaard’s team left him out there. The No. 45 climbed all the way to fifth just by staying out and then caught a lucky break when Colton Herta‘s tire came off on the racetrack to bring out the caution flag.
“We stayed out and got lucky there with the yellow at the end,” Lundgaard said. “We basically restarted fifth with the same tires as everybody else.”
Lundgaard was able to pit under caution and restart ahead of a ton of cars that had just pitted under the green flag. From there, he was on the defense. In the 48-lap green-flag run to end the race, he only lost four spots, bringing the RLL machine home in ninth.
But Lundgaard didn’t seem quite thrilled about that.
“We basically tanked down to ninth from fifth, and I think that just proves the lack of performance that we had compared to the others,” Lundgaard said. “And I don’t think the result today represents good performance. It’s more we still have a lot of work to do for tomorrow [Sunday’s race].”
Even if the speed isn’t there for the No. 45 team, that kind of finish has to give the team momentum, right? Lundgaard was a bit ho hum on that idea.
“The momentum is there, yes or no, I think we were just lucky with the strategy call at the end of the day,” Lundgaard said. “We kind of hung on, and everybody struggled with tires there at the end. And when everything bunched up, we kind of got back to the big group at the front with two laps to go, but none of us could do anything. I think the tire delta is pretty big.”
Even with the result, there is still concern about the speed of the RLL cars entering the second leg of the 250s at Milwaukee on Sunday. Lundgaard starts 25th in that race, and the cautions may not fall his way two days in a row.
When asked what the team needed to do to get the car better for Sunday, Lundgaard smiled and replied with, “Everything.”
Michael Massie joined Frontstretch in 2017 and has served as the Content Director since 2020. Massie, a Richmond, Va., native, has covered NASCAR, IndyCar, SRX and the CARS Tour. Outside of motorsports, the Virginia Tech grad and Green Bay Packers minority owner can be seen cheering on his beloved Hokies and Packers.