Charlie Kimball’s fourth-place finish on Sunday at Barber Motorsports Park would appear to be a definite sign of progress for the third-year IndyCar racer. The American finished 12th in the season-opener at St. Petersburg, but this weekend, he managed to convert his first-ever berth in the Firestone Fast Six into his second career Top 5 result.
Kimball led briefly for three laps in the race’s middle segment, but his best moment of the day arguably came on Lap 77 when he managed to get past Will Power through the track’s high-speed switchback section for fourth.
“The whole team did a great job this weekend, from the guys in the pits to the engineering staff working on race strategy,” Kimball said. “I just had to get it done on the race track. We started to see some real improvement at St. Petersburg, but didn’t really get the result we deserved. But it all came together for us today and it feels great.”
Kimball’s run was also part of a good weekend for Chip Ganassi Racing in their campaign for diabetes awareness with Novo Nordisk. Ganassi cars across IndyCar, NASCAR and Grand-Am competed with blue wheels, which represented the blue circle that serves as a global symbol for the International Diabetes Foundation (Kimball himself was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 2007).
In addition to Scott Dixon (second) and Kimball contributing Top 5 IndyCar finishes at Barber, Ganassi’s Grand-Am team of Scott Pruett and Memo Rojas notched a fourth-place run there as well. Also, Jamie McMurray finished seventh today in the Sprint Cup race at Martinsville, which he drove with a blue-and-orange scheme that echoed Kimball’s open-wheel livery.
“I’ll have to talk to Novo Nordisk to let me run that scheme all year,” Kimball told SPEED.com’s Marshall Pruett afterwards.
