Photo: Joe Skibinski
Yuven Sundaramoorthy claimed his maiden Indy Nxt podium at Gateway with hard-earned third place finish.
The Abel Motorsports driver’s best results in his first 10 races were ninth places. This summer his form has improved, twice finishing fourth at Laguna Seca and being third on the penultimate lap in one of those races.
Sundaramoorthy qualified eighth at Gateway, and after a chaotic start rose to fifth. He took fourth on lap 17 of 75 after a bold move, claimed third on lap 36 then resisted Andretti Cape’s Salvador de Alba by 0.1377 seconds.
“An incredible race. I love this track. Abel Motorsports gave me an amazing car. The #22 was on rails and I just did what I can early,” a thrilled Sundaramoorthy said.
“Made some good moves around the high side, and then end of the race, I think we were probably the fastest car in [turns] one and two, but it was just a little loose, loosey goosey in three and four. I saw Salvador catching and catching and catching, and I knew the only way that he was catching me was because he was flat through three and four.
“So last four laps, I put the pedal to the metal and tried not to loop it, but it ended up working out well by about a car length or so. Overall, really happy and I think this is just the start [for podiums].”
On his early progression, he added “I was expecting the outside line to be there [with grip] from the start” but “it went away a little faster than I was expecting” due to marbles. He was “only up into the grey stuff one time” though “so not too scary”.
Sundaramoorthy called his podium “a long time coming”.
“Confidence has been building this whole season race-by-race, and it always feels like we figure it out right after qualifying. So I was happy to get a semi-decent qualifying here, although it’s definitely harder starting earlier in the qualifying run.”
By pushing early, Sundaramoorthy “really burned the rear-right [tyre]” quickly. “Salvador was on fire at the end and I had to do everything I could to hold him off,” he admitted.
“The whole time there, I was in my mirrors looking at fourth place and remembering Laguna Seca. So it was definitely something that I just needed to do for myself. Got incredibly lucky with that yellow [flag period], that came out, and gave me some time to kind of regroup, focus and figure out what was wrong, what I needed to do with my tools in the car, what I was doing wrong. Once I did that, we went out and put some good laps together.”
Attacking early had another unintended consequence, Sundaramoorthy told Formula Scout:
“We were expecting traffic so ran a really loose car. And at the end of the day, there wasn’t much traffic. As soon as I dropped farther back behind Jacob [Abel in second], it was clean air, and just kind of try to hold on to it.”