Oilpressure

The grid for tomorrow’s Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama is now set. This appears to be the most “normal” starting grid we have had in the first three races of the season. Team Penske has pretty much dominated every session here this weekend and qualifying was no exception.

Will Power will start on the pole alongside Helio Castroneves. Their Penske teammate, Simon Pagenaud will start third. Josef Newgarden was the only Penske driver to not make the Firestone Fast Six, but he will still start seventh. The first non-Penske driver on the grid is Scott Dixon, who will start fourth on the outside of Row Two.

Ryan Hunter-Reay and James Hinchcliffe will make up Row Three. That means the top three cars on the grid were all Chevys and the next three were Hondas. Mikhail Aleshin, Max Chilton and Tony Kanaan will round out the Top-Ten, giving Honda seven of the first ten cars on the grid, but Chevy got the first three.

The weather is the biggest story. As I type, it’s still sunny and 82-degrees. But the radar shows the predicted storms are almost here. I just checked the weather in Nashville, just three hours to the north. It’s rainy and 54-degrees. We are all prepared for much cooler temps for tomorrow. That will effect the cars significantly. There will be a thirty minute warm-up in the morning to make some quick adjustments and that’s it. It should prove quite interesting in the race tomorrow.

Here’s a quick photo I took of of Helio Castroneves in qualifying and a very short ten-second video of Will Power on his run for the pole.

That’s going to do it for today. Tomorrow, Susan will have a very interesting article on what she did today and how it paid off for Sunday. Thanks for following along so far all weekend, and please check back here early tomorrow.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on April 22, 2017 at 5:31 pm and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.