Rosenqvist beats McLaughlin to Texas pole by thousandths

Arrow McLaren SP‘s Felix Rosenqvist will start on pole position for tomorrow’s 2022 NTT IndyCar Series XPEL 375 at Texas Motor Speedway. The Swedish driver would beat championship-leader Scott McLaughlin to the top spot by just fourteen-thousandths of a mile an hour, with the top five separated by just one-tenth.

Qualifying at Texas Motor Speedway saw each driver head out in the reverse order of owner’s points for two flying laps, with the fastest average speed across both laps determining who would start on pole position. The track was hot – with temperatures nearing triple figures – and the pace would be hotter still, with the vast majority of drivers averaging speeds of over 220-mph.

Rosenqvist’s #7 Chevrolet would head out on track inside the first half of the session. His two-lap average of 221.110-mph would comfortably put him on top of the time-sheets at the time, but as driver after driver took to the track after him, few could get close to him on the speed charts.

Ultimately, only five drivers would finish the session with a two-lap average in the 221-mph range. Dale Coyne Racing‘s Takuma Sato would be the first to seriously challenge the provisional pole time, but the Japanese driver would fall short by a tiny margin of just sixteen-thousandths of a mile an hour; a ridiculously tight margin.

However, Scott McLaughlin’s qualifying run at the very end of the session would see the New Zealander get even closer than Sato managed! The Team Penske Kiwi would slot into second on the grid, just two-thousandths of a mile an hour faster than Sato and only fourteenth-thousandths off of Rosenqvist.

With his rivals getting so close but yet so far, Rosenqvist would hang on to take his second NTT IndyCar Series pole position; with his first having come back in his rookie year in 2019 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course for Chip Ganassi Racing. After a difficult first year with McLaren last season and a tough first race at St. Petersburg a few weeks ago, Felix will be hoping that his pole position in Texas will begin to put himself back on the right track. Furthermore, he’ll be hoping for a strong race tomorrow at the venue where he came oh so close to victory in 2020 before a late-race accident.

Scott McLaughlin’s strong qualifying continues his superb start to the 2022 season. It should perhaps be no surprise that the sophomore driver looks fast at Texas Motor Speedway given the fact that the Penske driver scored his first IndyCar podium finish in his first oval start at this track last year.

Credit: Chris Jones – Courtesy of IndyCar

Similarly, Takuma Sato’s third-place in qualifying shouldn’t come as too much of a shock given his pedigree when it comes to oval racing. Despite numerous victories at other ovals, however, Texas remains one place that the Japanese driver has not taken victory at. He will be hoping to change that fact tomorrow in what will be his two-hundredth race start in IndyCar.

Will Power and Scott Dixon would round out the top five of the starting grid, with the pair being the last two drives to qualify inside the 221-mph range. Helio Castroneves would take his #06 Meyer Shank Racing Honda to sixth on the grid, with Josef Newgarden just behind in seventh-place; thus ensuring that all three Penske cars would qualify inside the top eight positions.

Ed Carpenter Racing‘s Rinus VeeKay will line up in eighth-place, with young-guns Colton Herta and Patricio O’Ward just behind on the fifth row of the grid in ninth and tenth respectively. Reigning series champion Alex Palou will start in eleventh place.

Several drivers are making their first-ever starts at Texas Motor Speedway in an IndyCar this weekend. Romain Grosjean will roll off in thirteenth place in the #28 Andretti Autosport Honda. Team-mate Devlin DeFrancesco will start in seventeenth-place, just ahead of eighteenth-placed Jimmie Johnson for Chip Ganassi Racing. Johnson, a seven-time winner at Texas in the NASCAR Cup Series, will make his first oval start in IndyCar tomorrow and will be hoping that his years of oval racing experience in stock cars transfer over to the world of single-seaters.

David Malukas will start in nineteenth-place for his first IndyCar oval start with Dale Coyne. He narrowly out-qualified British driver Callum Ilott for Juncos Hollinger Racing in twentieth-place who, unlike David, has never raced on an oval in any category.

Ilott’s fellow F2 graduate, Christian Lundgaard, was the lowest classified driver out of those making their Texas debuts tomorrow. The Dane will start in twenty-fifth place in the #30 Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing Honda. It was an uncharacteristically shocking day for the RLLR team, with Lundgaard’s team-mates Jack Harvey and Graham Rahal qualifying in twenty-fourth and twenty-seventh respectively as all three struggled to find speed on the race track. It would be a similarly difficult day for the three A.J. Foyt Racing cars, with Dalton Kellett, Kyle Kirkwood and J.R. Hildebrand (racing in Tatiana Calderon‘s #11 Chevrolet), qualifying in twenty-second, twenty-third and twenty-sixth.

XPEL 375 – Qualifying Results

RANK	CAR NO.	DRIVER	NAT	TEAM	AVERAGE LAP SPEED (MPH)
1	7	Felix Rosenqvist	SWE	Arrow Mclaren SP	221.110
2	3	Scott McLaughlin	NZL	Team Penske	221.096
3	51	Takuma Sato	JAP	Dale Coyne Racing w/ Rick Ware	221.094
4	12	Will Power	AUS	Team Penske	221.016
5	9	Scott Dixon	NZL	Chip Ganassi Racing	221.011
6	06	Helio Castroneves	BRA	Meyer Shank Racing	220.768
7	2	Josef Newgarden	USA	Team Penske	220.758
8	21	Rinus VeeKay	NET	Ed Carpenter Racing	220.748
9	26	Colton Herta	USA	Andretti Autosport	220.602
10	5	Patricio O’Ward	MEX	Arrow McLaren SP	220.579
11	10	Alex Palou	ESP	Chip Ganassi Racing	220.571
12	27	Alexander Rossi	USA	Andretti Autosport	220.458
13	28	Romain Grosjean	FRA	Andretti Autosport	220.412
14	8	Marcus Ericsson	SWE	Chip Ganassi Racing	220.364
15	60	Simon Pagenaud	FRA	Meyer Shank Racing	220.338
16	20	Conor Daly	USA	Ed Carpenter Racing	219.987
17	29	Devlin DeFrancesco (R)	CAN	Andretti Autosport	219.888
18	48	Jimmie Johnson	USA	Chip Ganassi Racing	219.865
19	18	David Malukas (R)	USA	Dale Coyne Racing w/ HMD Motorsports	219.864
20	77	Callum Ilott (R)	GBR	Juncos Hollinger Racing	219.462
21	33	Ed Carpenter	USA	Ed Carpenter Racing	219.212
22	4	Dalton Kellett	CAN	A.J. Foyt Racing	219.038
23	14	Kyle Kirkwood (R)	USA	A.J. Foyt Racing	219.013
24	45	Jack Harvey	GBR	Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing	218.781
25	30	Christian Lundgaard (R)	DEN	Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing	218.687
26	11	J.R. Hildebrand	USA	A.J. Foyt Racing	218.584
27	15	Graham Rahal	USA	Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing	218.410

(R) – Rookie