Team Target kicked off the MoveThatBlock.com Indy 225 weekend by pacing both of Thursday’s practice sessions.   Driver Dario Franchitti posted the quick time in both the morning and afternoon session, while teammate Scott Dixon ran fifth in practice one and moved up to second at the end of practice two.

Franchitti’s fastest lap of the day came during the latter segment, when he ran a lap of 21.5665-seconds at a speed of 171.099 miles per hour.  Dixon was unable to break through to the 21-second range in practice one, but managed to find the right combination and put down the second-fastest lap of the day at 21.6204-seconds (170.672 mph) on one of his final runs.

Team Target will hit the track for two more practice sessions on Saturday morning, before they qualify that afternoon.  The MoveThatBlock.com Indy 225 will be broadcast live on Sunday, August 14 at 3:30 PM on ABC.

Dario Franchitti: “The car was good today. My first order of business was to learn the track and the first run felt good. It is definitely easier to learn a place when the car is doing what you want it to. We worked on the car all day just trying to change some pieces and improve. It was difficult to find those small gains, but we reached our goal by the end of the day. I think we are in good shape now, but we will be chasing the track a little bit this weekend. The engineers have done a great job preparing for this weekend. Scott (Dixon) came up and tested here for us and did a good job getting information for us.”

Scott Dixon: “The car felt good today. We struggled at the beginning of the day with a few set-up changes that we had to go through. Traffic is chaotic here because it seems like some cars are very slow and you catch them really fast. So most of the challenge is dealing with that. We spent a lot of time working on the race car and I feel pretty comfortable now. The Target cars were quick today and so was Graham (Rahal) so we are in good shape, but we will see what happens Saturday and Sunday.”