Muscle Milk Pickett Racing continued their hot streak at the Canadian Tire Motorsport Park on Saturday by scoring their third consecutive pole position at the track formerly known as Mosport International Raceway. As they did last season and the one before that, the Muscle Milk squad led every on-track session they took part in leading up to qualifying and once again came out on top, this time by more than two seconds over the second place Dyson Racing car.
Birthday boy Klaus Graf receives a whip cream pie in the face for his birthday from teammate Lucas Luhr. Klaus Graf who was on qualifying duty didn’t waste any time getting his fastest lap in. The German who is also celebrating his birthday today, registered his best lap of one minute 6.486 seconds on his third timed lap around the 2.459-mile, 10-turn road course, despite having a huge ‘moment’ in Turn 2 on the preceding lap.
The pole position is the third of the season for the Greg Pickett-led team who also started at the front of the field at Sebring and Laguna Seca earlier this year.
Muscle Milk Quotes
Klaus Graf, #6 Muscle Milk HPD ARX-03a : “(About being so quick right off the truck) We kind of know the baseline of the car now. We have a really good engineering staff so we kind of know what we need coming here, having said that you never quite know until you’ve been on the track. Lucas and I have been here, many, many times. We both won here multiple times so it doesn’t take us too much time to get up to speed and our Muscle Milk HPD ARX-03a was in the ballpark right away. We also have some really good Michelin tires that we are very confident with. Contrary to what some might think, we worked a lot despite being quick right away, and we always do. People often think that it looks easy because we’re fast right out of the box but we put a lot of thought into it and we made a lot of changes and the guys worked really hard in between sessions to improve the car. It’s a good team effort and we have a good group of people and good partners with HPD and Michelin. I think it’s a combination of all those things. (About his moment) I had a moment in Turn 2, I had big eyes on that one, believe me. That reminded me you that you have to listen, wake up, you really have to stay on it, especially here you can not let off a split second.”
Greg Pickett, Team Owner, #6 Muscle Milk HPD ARX-03a : “We like Canada, we like coming up here, we like the Canadian people and this track seems to like us. Also, we have a great Canadian partner in Multimatic. We have our Multimatic shocks on our Muscle Milk HPD ARX-03a that are very important on a track like this, they really are a premium here. Once again Klaus did an amazing job. He did have a moment in Turn 2 on his second lap. That was really exciting, there wasn’t a lot of track left! But as Klaus and Lucas proved at the last race at Lime Rock they are world-class prototype racers in every respect. Also, my hats off to the crew, that kind of continuity and that kind of consistency of performance is hard to come by. There wasn’t anything the same about the last three poles as we’ve had different cars each time we’ve been here but we’ve had the same results. Part of that commonality is that there is a bunch of the same guys on the team and partners such as Michelin. The continuity is a good thing in this sport. I couldn’t be happier.”
Source : Muscle Milk Pickett Racing