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Colton Herta has been fast all weekend, and today’s Qualifying for the Big Machine Music City Grand Prix. He landed on the pole in a qualifying session that was not lacking drama. The Team Penske cars were not exactly on-pace all weekend, but three out of four of them advanced into Round Two, with Scott McLaughlin being the lone exception.

As Round Two was coming to an end, Josef Newgarden was the only Penske car on the verge of advancing – but he was on the bubble as the sixth quickest when time was running down. Perhaps he was pushing too hard to try and make sure he was in the Firestone Fast Six to compete for the pole in his hometown race. Whatever the case, Newgarden hit the Turn Eleven wall with heavy impact. He was penalized for causing a local yellow and lost his best lap, dropping him from sixth to twelfth. The penalty moved Romain Grosjean into the Firestone Fast Six, but he did not improve his position in the final round.

The Top Three rows will be Herta and Scott Dixon on the Front Row, Alex Palou and Alexander Rossi on Row Two and Felix Rosenqvist and Grosjean on Row Three.

Herta was presented with a special trophy for winning pole, besides the usual NTT P1 Pole Award. This was a trophy dedicated to the memory of the late Bryan Clauson.

Herta didn’t offer much in the post-qualifying press conference, other than he promised that the start to tomorrow’s race was going to be wild. He said he was very happy to be starting up front, and have all of the craziness behind him.

That is going to do it for us for tonight. It’s been another long, but fun day at the race track. It will be weird going to our next Titans game here, to look out over the parking lot and think that an IndyCar race was run there not too long ago.

Susan’s post is complete, but it will run first thing in the morning. We will try to get to the track early tomorrow morning. The IndyCar warmup will be at noon and be shown on Peacock. The green flag for tomorrow’s race will drop a little after 4:30 pm local time, and will be shown on NBCSN. Check back early for Susan’s post.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on August 7, 2021 at 6:54 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.