IndyCar News: Alex Palou Wins Pole for Sonsio Grand Prix

Alex Palou continued his complete domination of the NTT IndyCar Series by winning the pole for tomorrow’s Sonsio Grand Prix with a time of 1m09.3417s.

Graham Rahal will start the race in second with a time of 1m09.7516s, 0.4s behind Palou and his #10 Ganassi Honda sponsored by DHL around the Indianapolis Speedway Road Course. Rahal was fastest in practice but came up short in qualifying.

Rookie Louis Foster will start third, his best of the season, after putting together a lap of 1m09.8801s, 0.54s behind Palou.

Team Penske’s Scott McLaughlin will start in fourth place, after putting down a lap of 1m09.8910s, 0.55s behind Palou.

Rahal’s teammate Devlin DeFrancesco will start tomorrow  fifth after a lap of 1m09.9432s, 0.6s behind Palou.

Josef Newgarden will start sixth after a lap of 1m09.9829s, 0.64s behind Palou.

Graham Rahal

The Rahal Letterman Lanigan drivers were proud to have all of their cars in the top five.  Graham Rahal commented on their success.  “It’s a huge day for us. Really happy for these two guys as well as everybody on our organization. It’s been a lot of hard work. I think coming into this weekend we expected to be good here, but I don’t think we unloaded necessarily in a great place this morning. I don’t know, we were just battling the rear of the cars. It’s cool, though, so it’s hard to tell conditions-wise as things change throughout the day.”

“We battled hard today. I thought we made a lot of improvements. There’s a lot of great feedback between all three of us to try to figure out the right steps forward as we went into qualifying.”

“I wish we could understand what works here that we could take to everywhere else because it would certainly be nice to have this confidence going to any track. We’re not going to complain.”

Alex Palou

Alex Palou made taking the pole look easy.   He talked about his qualifying run and how the tire strategy will affect the race tomorrow.

“Yeah, the car has been really, really fast all day, but especially qualifying. Qualifying was really, really good. I had a couple of moments there locking a couple of tires, especially on Fast Six. That was big.”

“Yeah, I’ve been struggling. I think everybody has been struggling a little bit unlocking. 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, yeah, the tire doesn’t like it. We’re going to have to use that tire tomorrow, so it’s going to be exciting.”

” The new tire rule is going to make it interesting in a way of like if the primary or the hard tire is bad or the red tire is bad, bad in a way of not being fast and having more deg, you’re just going to have to do it again, and everybody is going to go through that.”

“I think all the cars, they have — or all the drivers they have a preference on which tire to run always, and tomorrow you cannot have that preference. You need to be good. You need to be fast on both of them. ”

Sonsio GP Qualifying Results

Lucille Dust reporting live from Indianapolis