IndyCar

Power takes IndyCar pole tally to 70 with Iowa double

by Jack Benyon
4 min read

Will Power took his third and fourth consecutive Iowa Speedway poles and took his IndyCar tally to 70 in the process in qualifying for this weekend’s double-leader, as championship leader Alex Palou claimed seventh and 12th.

Qualifying was delayed by almost two hours after a heavy downpour minutes before the session was due to begin.

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It’s a huge weekend for Palou’s rivals to attempt to reduce a 117-point lead at one of his self-professed worst tracks. Qualifying being cancelled for rain would have set the grids on owner points, giving Palou a pair of poles.

Luckily for his rivals, the track was dried and qualifying went ahead. Each driver did two laps and the first lap formed the grid for Saturday’s race one and the second lap set the grid for race two on Sunday.

Power – who reached the Fast Six in qualifying for the first time this season last week in Toronto – notched Team Penske’s first pole of the season and followed it up with a second lap good enough to make a pole double.

As cars ran in reverse championship order, at the time he set his laps he was 3mph clear of his rivals with 3mph splitting second to 15th at that point.

He threw his Chevrolet-powered car into Turn 1 at 191mph on both laps and managed to avoid any tyre fall-off to take the top spots. That ends a run of Honda poles that began at the mid-April Long Beach round. Prior to Iowa, Chevy’s last pole was with Felix Rosenqvist at Texas Motor Speedway at the start of April.

For race one, he’ll start ahead of Penske team-mates Scott McLaughlin, and event favourite Josef Newgarden who has led more laps than the rest of the field combined at this track and was furious he was only good enough for third and seventh on the grids for the two races.

Penske took the contentious decision to skip last month’s Iowa test to go to Road America ahead of that race instead, leaving uncertainty over whether it would be left behind by the other teams. That uncertainty was answered in the qualifying results.

Scott Dixon and last year’s Iowa race two winner Pato O’Ward round out the top five for race one.

Race 1 grid

Power and McLaughlin again topped the pack for race two but a number of early runners managed to go quicker on second laps and put themselves much higher up the order.

David Malukas rounded out the top three for Dale Coyne Racing. After his podium at Gateway last year, the series’ second-youngest driver is establishing a strong reputation on the shorter ovals. He had also skipped the test at Iowa, where team-mate Sting Ray Robb ran instead.

A huge moment at Turn 1 on lap one almost ended his qualifying but he showed an extraordinary amount of bravery to keep the throttle pedal down and was rewarded for his efforts with ninth in race one and third in race two.

Team owner/driver Ed Carpenter was the first car out on track and took fourth for race two despite not having driven in IndyCar since the Indianapolis 500, ahead of Colton Herta.

Herta’s Andretti Autosport engineer Nathan O’Rourke had told The Race in the build-up that the team was happy with its recent test where it was fastest and improved tyre wear, with short ovals being a big focus in the off-season.

Race 2 grid

Rahal Letterman Lanigan’s Jack Harvey qualified 17th for race one but received a nine-place penalty for causing an incident in Toronto – he’s the car on the inside in the video below – so he’ll start 25th for race one.

He’s 22nd for race two, one spot behind last week’s Toronto breakthrough winner Christian Lundgaard, who was 19th for race one.

Lundgaard is running a new livery after he begged his RLL team and sponsor Hyvee – which also backs the Iowa event – to have some green on his car as his Toronto car was green. The usual Hyvee livery is all black.

Last for both races is Benjamin Pedersen after his Foyt team failed tech inspection on Saturday morning and wasn’t allowed to qualify.

 

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