TOUGH RETURN FOR DE SILVESTRO

Simona de Silvestro, who raced the

2021 Indy 500 for Paretta Autosport, last weekend raced an Indycar on a road course for the first time since 2015. It was a tough refresher course, as she had anticipated, for the popular Swiss 33-yearold had no test days under her belt. With Beth Paretta’s ‘women forward’ team now being run in partnership with Ed Carpenter Racing (as opposed to last year’s outing with Penske), de Silvestro was able to pool data with ECR full-timers Rinus Veekay and Conor Daly, but it was a rough weekend for the squad as a whole.

In first practice, de Silvestro was 3.1 seconds off the fastest time, 1.8s from Daly and only one second slower than the struggling Veekay, while in FP2 the gaps were similar to top spot and her lead team-mate.

That deficit grew considerably in Q1 – 3.5s from the top, 2.4s behind Daly – and while de Silvestro was hard on herself for not exploiting the extra grip offered by Firestone’s alternate-compound tyres, her efforts were interrupted by a drivethrough penalty for pitlane speeding, so she missed the sweet spot on her red rubber.

Come the race, her fastest lap was 3.4s from Josef Newgarden’s best, 2.2s from Daly and only 1.1s slower than Veekay. She came home 21st.

“It was really important to finish this race,” said de Silvestro. “We had so much going on with me getting back in the car, getting to know the team again and working with my engineer. But I think we can be pretty happy because things started to come together at the end.

It’s something to build on.”

Her next outing comes in three weeks at Mid-ohio.