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A tale of two weekends

Zach Veach and Gabby Chaves lead the championship standings in the Indy Lights Series going into Barber this weekend.

Zach Veach, Andretti Autosport

Zach Veach, Andretti Autosport

Bret Kelley

Zach Veach and Gabby Chaves may only be separated by one point in the 2014 Indy Lights points standings heading into Barber Motorsports Park, but their respective weekends have been just as tight.

During the first two timed sessions, Chaves had the upper hand on Veach. The gap was a little under half a second after the test session on Thursday and just under six-tenths of a second after the Friday morning practice session.

However, qualifying was a different story entirely as Veach was able to grab provisional pole position with his fastest lap of the weekend of 1:17.3743 over Chaves’s time of 1:17.5905, which was good enough for third position on the grid for Saturday’s race.

Veach’s time was nearly .42 seconds faster than his morning practice session time, and Veach was direct about how he obtained his newfound speed.

“We honestly kind of threw everything but the driver off of it. We wanted to change a lot of things in the car because when we were back here in February testing it was a lot cooler, and I think we developed the car around cooler temperatures, so we were really a step behind yesterday and this morning,” Veach said.

Chaves briefly had the edge early in the session, but his car wasn’t perfect throughout the qualifying session.

“The temperature just threw our setup a little bit off and we missed it by a little bit. We couldn’t take advantage of the new tires that we wanted to,” Chaves said.

Veach’s pole position also garnered him another bonus point in the championship, increasing his lead to two points over Chaves.

“I think at this point we’re taking everything we can because it’s early on, you don’t know what’s going to happen later through the year, so we just want to do the best we can,” Veach said.

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