At the track that sparked his 2023 title run, Alex Palou grabs pole for Sonsio Grand Prix
INDIANAPOLIS -- Alex Palou kicked off his Month of May a year ago by demolishing his 26 competitors on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course with a resounding 16.8-second victory after starting on the outside of the second row.
Saturday? He'll start on pole, after what he characterized as a "tough day" for the No. 10 Chip Ganassi Racing crew with a pair of practices, as well as qualifying for Saturday afternoon's Sonsio Grand Prix.
"But that's the perfect place to be," Palou said of his fourth career IndyCar pole. "Any time you start out front in IndyCar, it's amazing. I'm looking forward to tomorrow."
A year ago Saturday marked the start of his assault on the championship race, where he'd go on to win four of five races over a span of more than six weeks. His only non-victory? The Indianapolis 500, where he started on pole and worked his way back to 4th by the checkered flag after dropping lower than 25th after Rinus VeeKay spun on pitlane and spearing the No. 10 Honda during a pitstop just before the race's halfway point.
The Spaniard would finish his second title run in three years with a worst finish of 8th, 10 podiums and five wins. Through three points-paying races -- and four events overall, including his victory at the $1 Million Challenge exhibition at The Thermal Club -- he's finished no lower than 5th.
It will be on the shoulders of Christian Lundgaard, Will Power, Josef Newgarden and others to keep Palou from sparking another title push as they too start up front for Saturday's 85-lapper. For Lundgaard, it's nothing new, after Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing swept the pair of poles for IndyCar's two IMS road course races in 2023, though his teammate Graham Rahal's runner-up finish in the second race produced the only podium-related hardware the team had to show for its efforts.
For Power, it's a shot to add to his five victories on the 2.439-mile, 14-turn road course owned by his boss, where he's logged a pair of runner-up finishes through three races -- putting him just a single point behind championship leader Colton Herta.
For Newgarden, a victory Saturday would mark the start of a much-needed redemption arc as the two-time series champion has found himself ensnared in IndyCar's most toxic on-track scandal in recent memory as the face of his team's misuse of push-to-pass in Newgarden's season-opening victory at St. Pete. There, all three Team Penske drivers' cars were equipped with the ability to use overtake on starts and restarts against longstanding rules, due to the alleged oversight of team lead data engineering Robbie Atkinson, who changed coding on all three drivers' setup profiles for the purposes of its hybrid test program.
The mistake was found during Sunday morning warmup for the Grand Prix of Long Beach and led to the disqualification of Newgarden's St. Pete win and teammate Scott McLaughlin's 3rd-place finish, along with 10 lost points for Power, a trio of $25,000 fines from the series and four multi-race suspensions for involved team personnel levied by team owner Roger Penske this week.
'It’s Roger’s team': Josef Newgarden, Will Power surprised by Team Penske May suspensions
Herta runs out of fuel on final Round 1 qualifying lap
Herta proved two years ago that wins can come from deep within the mid-pack on the IMS road course after starting 14th, but the current series points leader is going to have to overtake well over half the field, should he hope to generate some more magic Saturday.
The Andretti Global driver will start 24th for the Sonsio Grand Prix after a befuddling mistake during Round 1 of qualifying Friday afternoon, where his No. 26 Gainbridge Honda ran out of fuel midway through his final competitive push lap in the hunt of one of six advancing spots for the Fast 12. With one minute remaining in Group 2's session, the Andretti Global driver sat 3rd-fastest behind the Ganassi duo of Palou and Scott Dixon but, as expected, began to trickle down the leaderboard as drivers ahead of him on-track registered their first of as many as two flying laps.
As Herta was on his own second one, sitting still on the right side of the elimination line with 30 seconds to go, his crew noticed his 'low fuel' sensor going off, and within seconds, the 24-year-old began to slow, astutely steering his car into a runoff to avoid bringing out a red flag that would've lost him his fastest lap and dropped him further down the starting grid.
Herta's strategist Rob Edwards, who also serves as Andretti Global's COO, told the Peacock broadcast that the team had, in fact, planned to run a pair of push laps, rather than just one which can sometimes be typical protocol depending on the life of the tires. The shortcoming, then, was in failing to fuel the car up to their planned level before releasing Herta to close out his run.
Beyond that, one of the couple teams who came into this weekend expecting big things after having tested on the track on the race weekend tire earlier this spring failed to get either of its other two cars out of Round 1, too. With Meyer Shank Racing's Felix Rosenqvist, the sister car via the Andretti Technologies link, easily advancing into the second round and appearing to be one of the stronger cars on-track yet again, Edwards was left scratching his head for some answers, as Kyle Kirkwood earned a 14th-place starting spot and Marcus Ericsson finished 21st on the grid.
"We've got to look at Felix, because we're obviously doing the same thing they are, and there's good speed to que off of," Edwards said. "Colton probably had the right speed on that lap, but halfway around, we knew we were in trouble."
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Alex Palou kicks off May with IMS road course pole for Sonsio Grand Prix
