Romain Grosjean continues impressive 2nd season at Andretti, capturing pole at Barber

Less than halfway through Romain Grosjean’s first practice of the weekend at Barber Motorsports Park, his No. 28 Honda Andretti Autosport machine spewed smoke out the back. Bad news turned worse when he learned minutes later he’d suffered an engine failure – just a couple days before his team had planned to switch it out.

The incident left him with just nine laps under his belt entering Saturday’s short second practice ahead of qualifying – with 19 of his 26 competitors running at least twice that Friday. And perhaps most importantly, he never got to throw on the Firestone alternate tires to get an important read on balance for qualifying.

Luckily, the Swiss-born Frenchman said after snagging his third-career IndyCar pole, “I’ve got a hell of a team that’s been doing such a great job this year. I’ve got three teammates I can rely on and went with their setups, and the moment we started qualifying, I knew we had it.”

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Grosjean recovered well in Practice No. 2 with the 6th-quickest lap Saturday morning but needed a fast final lap in Round 1 to leap from 7th to 2nd, knocking current points leader Marcus Ericsson out of the Fast 12.

Then, Grosjean paced the Fast 12 and held the fastest time entering the final minute of qualifying before the six drivers – representing five different teams – started jumping all over the place. Pato O’Ward, the defending winner who will start 3rd, and Scott McLaughlin each took hold of the top spot briefly in that final minute of their second-to-last laps of the session. With 20 seconds left, four of the other five drivers were on-track to beat O’Ward’s best lap, and when the checkered flag fell, Grosjean and McLaughlin had the pole in their sights.

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The Andretti driver managed to finish out the lap. In the 12 total races IndyCar has run at the 2.3-mile natural terrain road course just outside Birmingham, Ala., five previous polesitters have gone on to win the race, and nine of the 12 winners have qualified in the top-3, including the last four.

“We’ll see. We’re starting with the best position, and we’ve got 90 laps (and 207 miles) to go,” Grosjean said of his opportune starting spot, his second pole of the season. “I was very stressed that session, and I don’t know why. I told them on the radio, ‘I’m too old for this!’ but I guess I’m not.”

Alex Palou, who won in his first start at Barber in 2021 on his way to his championship in Year 1 with Chip Ganassi Racing, will start on the front alongside Grosjean in 2^nd, having missed out on pole by fewer than eight-hundredths of a second. O’Ward, who also missed out on pole by less than a tenth will start 3^rd. McLaughlin, who paced the weekend’s first practice Friday and ran third-fastest in Saturday morning’s practice, will start 4^th. Scott Dixon (5^th) and Christian Lundgaard (6^th) will make up the third row, with the former still looking for his first win at the track after 12 starts that ended in six runner-up finishes and nine podiums.

“We finished 2^nd in the (second IMS road course race in 2022) after starting 6^th, so we’ll take it,” said Lundgaard, who’s been the lone bright spot for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing this weekend as the team looks to recover from an up-and-down start to the year. “We’ve made some progress this weekend – a big step, at least on my car."

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A talent-packed group of six drivers just narrowly missed out on Saturday’s Fast 6, including three-time Barber winner Josef Newgarden (7^th), Felix Rosenqvist (8^th), last year’s pole-sitter Rinus VeeKay (9^th), Alexander Rossi (10^th), two-time Barber winner Will Power (11^th) and Kyle Kirkwood (12^th), the winner IndyCar’s most recent race.

“I’m frustrated and annoyed – mostly at myself,” said Newgarden, after missing out on the Fast 6 by less than seven-hundredths. “It’s disappointing not to transfer. We tried something different in the warmup, and it just is what it is, but we’ve got a fast car.”

For VeeKay, who had started no better than 19^th this year and is yet to log a top-10, a 9^th-place qualifying performance was “like a pole position,” even after he (as well as Power) slid off-track on his final lap that was close to taking him into the advancing six cars.

Other important notes from IndyCar qualifying at Barber

• Marcus Armstrong, presently the leader of the rookies points race despite having missed the Texas oval race last month, narrowly missed on advancing from the first round and appeared set to start Sunday in 14^th – possibly putting him in line for yet another top-12 to begin his IndyCar career. But IndyCar race control docked him his two fastest laps for interfering on Lundgaard after both drivers had exited the pits to run their final couple laps of the session on alternate tires.

After he hopped out of the car, the young New Zealander was confused, believing both drivers had just been on warmup laps trying to get heat into their new sets of tires and uncertain how he could’ve been impeding Lundgaard.

“I’m not exactly sure what he was hoping for,” Armstrong said. “I don’t know who I can speak to, but nevertheless, we didn’t progress. It was fairly close, but that’s a shame. With the penalty, he fell from 14^th to 26^th on Sunday’s starting grid.

• Coming off his strongest finish of the year at Long Beach in 4^th, Colton Herta also came away scratching his head as to how he’ll end up starting so far back Sunday (in 14^th) – particularly with his teammate Grosjean starting on pole and Kirkwood also ahead in 12^th. “This is a strange place. I’ve never qualified well here, never been in a Fast 6,” he said. “We were a little loose, but the balance felt okay, and I should’ve transferred. I’ll have to look at what went wrong and why we were so slow, but we shouldn’t be getting knocked out in Round 1.”

• Other notables starting in the back-half of Sunday’s field include Callum Ilott (15^th), Simon Pagenaud (16^th), David Malukas (17^th), Graham Rahal (19^th), Conor Daly (20^th), Helio Castroneves (21^st) and Jack Harvey (24^th).

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IndyCar: Andretti's Romain Grosjean captures 2nd pole of 2023 at Barber