By Austin Lawton, Staff Writer
The Month of May is finally here which means the NTT IndyCar Series will spend the next three weeks at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Instead of taking to the famous 2.5-mile oval, the drivers will first run the Sonsio Grand Prix on the 2.439-mile, 14 turn road course.
Last week, Alex Palou took the win at Barber Motorsports Park in dominating fashion, leading 81 of the 90 possible laps, for his third win of the season. Now, Palou and the rest of the No.10 Chip Ganassi Racing crew look to continue their historic run tomorrow at Indianapolis, vying for their third win in a row on the IMS road course.
It’s hard not to keep an eye on the Spaniard each and every race week. Even when it may seem like he is having an off day, he will come back and prove why that’s not the case. In qualifying on Friday, Palou claimed the top spot, his second pole of the season and in a row. Palou managed to set the fastest time of the weekend at 1:09:34, gapping the field by four tenths of a second.
“The car has been really, really fast all day, but especially qualifying,” Palou said. “Qualifying was really, really good. I had a couple of moments there locking a couple of tires, especially in the Fast Six. I’ve been struggling. I think everybody has been struggling a little bit. I think the track grip is super high. It gives you a lot of confidence, so we start pushing, pushing, pushing, but we get to a point where the tire says ‘no’, which makes it really fun to drive, but then suddenly you get moments like that where. the tire doesn’t like it. We’re going to have to use that tire tomorrow, so it’s going to be exciting.”
Despite the blistering lap and gaining tenth after tenth on each run, Palou, surprisingly, could not extract more from the car.
“I think the tires were already on the limit, like, you had two good laps,” Palou said. “In our case it was the second lap. Locking up on the first one didn’t help, but we didn’t really lose a big first lap because we were always, like, two-tenths slower. Then after that the tires just started giving up.”
Making up half of the Firestone Fast Six (the final round in IndyCar’s knockout qualifying),was Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing. The three car team of Graham Rahal, rookie Louis Foster and Devlin Defrancesco took second, third and fifth, respectively. The IMS road course has suited the RLL team for years and Friday’s qualifying result is a result of months-and-months of hard work.
“Huge day for us,” Rahal said. “I’m really happy for these two guys [DeFrancesco and Foster], as well as everyone on our organization. It’s been a lot of hard work. Coming into this weekend, we expected to be good here, but I don’t think we unloaded necessarily in a good place this morning. Battling the rear of the car and it’s cool so it’s hard to tell conditions-wise. We battled hard today, with a lot of improvements and a lot of great feedback.”
The RLL crew will look to maximize on the momentum as they look to have their best weekend of the season so far, as well as carry it into the Indianpolis 500, where improvement is much needed.
Scott McLaughlin piloted the No. 3 Sonsio Chevrolet for Team Penske to fourth, breaking up an all-Honda Top Five.
Another storyline to look out for is a new rule for this weekend only. drivers are now required to use two sets of the alternate, red compound tire and the primary, black, tire during the race. Normally, teams are allocated five sets of black tires and four sets of red (or green on street courses) tires. That remains un-changed for the IMS road course. The rule was set in order to drum up better racing at the Indy road course and give teams extra strategy options.
With perfect weather tomorrow, its all to play for to see who can stop Alex Palou. Will it be the RLL crew? Or will one of the three Team Penske drivers start May on the right foot? The green flag flies at 4:30 p.m. ET on FOX.