TORONTO July 10—Ryan Hunter-Reay and the ABC Supply team have one goal this weekend—to get that proverbial Monkey off their collective back!

They made some progress towards doing just that with the first day of practice on the Honda Indy Toronto’s street course here in Exhibition Place. Hunter-Reay’s first practice session saw him 11th out of the 23 cars on track with a speed of 100.820mph (1:02:66).

The ABC Supply team made more progress in the second session where they were seventh quick in mid-session and then slid to 14th quick as teams put on new tires. He clocked a speed of 101.129mph [1:02:47]. Hunter-Reay also went out on new rubber with 11 minutes to go but two full course yellows and traffic combined to prevent him from getting a hot lap in before the session ended.

“It was a pretty good day for us,” said Hunter-Reay after the second practice session. “We put the ABC Supply car in the top-10 constantly all day. We’re not sitting where our performance actually is at the moment –at the end of the day we finished up 14th but that’s because we didn’t get our run on new tires in when everyone else around us did. Hopefully we’ll be able to carry that speed into tomorrow. We kept things simple today and it worked for us. I’m looking forward to tomorrow -- it’s possibly going to be wet. Racing around Toronto in the wet is definitely difficult so it should be an interesting day.”

Tomorrow the team will have a half hour practice session in the morning before qualifying begins at 2 pm.  There is a 70% chance of rain tomorrow.