Power on pole, Grosjean starting 14th on oval debut

Team Penske’s Will Power scored pole position on the Gateway oval, while IndyCar points leader Alex Palou will start 21st after a nine-place grid penalty and Romain Grosjean will start 14th in his first oval race.

The order was set on the best average lap time over two laps of the 1.25-mile oval.

Grosjean was arguably the biggest storyline entering this race, which is his first on an oval and key to deciding if he does a full IndyCar season next year.

Having done only done a test and an hour and a half practice session at Gateway, Grosjean said he was “not too unhappy” with his lap although he needed a stronger front end because he had so much rear grip.

It was the second lap that really slowed the Dale Coyne Racing driver down but he still set the 15th fastest time which will become 14th on the grid after Palou’s penalty is applied.

It is also only three spots behind Scott McLaughlin, who Grosjean is two points behind in the battle for rookie of the year despite McLaughlin doing a full season with Team Penske.

It was a strong day for McLaughlin’s Penske team-mates who filled three of the top four positions in the fight for pole.

The three cars behind Power all went slower on their second laps whereas Power jumped from a lap of 180.158mph – which he said was slowed by forgetting to shift down to fourth gear – to 181.081mph on the second lap, the best single lap run of the day.

Power beat Andretti Autosport’s Colton Herta by just 0.0248s over two laps, with Power making the most of the confidence boost from winning last weekend’s Indianapolis road course race.

Amazingly for a driver with 56 poles entering this weekend, Gateway is Power’s first of a difficult 2021 campaign.

Herta got right up against the Turn 4 exit wall before his lap even started and then hit the limiter in third gear on his second lap, but he’ll still start second and maintain his series best average starting position.

Josef Newgarden was fastest in practice and won here last year, but struggled to match his team-mate Power’s speed and will line up third, ahead of Simon Pagenaud who ties his best starting position of the year.

Pagenaud was still less than a tenth off team-mate Power despite coming fourth.

Pato O’Ward put himself in a great position to further eat into Palou’s championship lead.

After O’Ward lowered the gap last weekend to 21 points when Palou had an engine issue, that same issue and the subsequent engine change is what caused Palou to fall down the order. He qualified 12th but is bumped nine places for the penalty to 21st.

O’Ward starts fifth at a circuit where he scored two podiums in the double-header last year with his Arrow McLaren SP team.

With Palou so far back, his Chip Ganassi Racing team-mate Marcus Ericsson is his best hope of taking points off his title rivals as Ericsson starts sixth, despite lamenting a lack of speed in the #8 car.

Herta’s Andretti team-mate Alexander Rossi anticipated that his time – which was fastest when he completed it – would be beaten through improving conditions and he was proved correct as he qualified seventh.

Scott Dixon also has a chance to narrow his points deficit to team-mate Palou with an eighth starting position, in a qualifying run where he cursed himself for not pushing his car hard enough over his two runs.

Rounding out the top 10, Graham Rahal and Felix Rosenqvist.

Rosenqvist – who usually runs well at Gateway – was one of the stars of qualifying as he was fastest for a long stint as he was the second car to qualify. Given track improvements, that made his time all the more impressive for Arrow McLaren SP.

The race takes place tonight at 2045hrs ET on Saturday.

Most of the cars’ set-up was frozen at the start of qualifying so only things like front wing angle and tyre pressures can now be changed. Items such as suspension geometry and gear ratios were frozen starting qualifying.

All drivers managed to avoid crashing on their qualifying laps. Because the race comes shortly after qualifying it was vital to keep the car on the road in case any repairs took too long and stopped you starting the race, which has happened on one day oval events in IndyCar before.

Qualifying Results