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Even though the 2011 IndyCar season is still almost two months away, the build up for what could be a stellar season is already underway. Brian Barnhart, the IndyCar Series Chief Operating Officer, announced today that IndyCars is dropping the Indy Racing League name, in favor of IndyCars, and that starting with the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500, restarts will be double-file, stealing a page from the Nascar book. That, plus all the other previous announcements, including the re-entry of Chevrolet and introduction of Lotus as engine suppliers to the series, put 2011 as a pivotal year and precursor to a very eventful 2012.
If the notion of double-file restarts doesn’t get you excited, maybe a very well produced promotional video from the IndyCars YouTube channel will.
SONOMA, Calif. – Will Power earned his IZOD IndyCar Series-record eighth PEAK Performance Pole Award of the season. Advancing to the Firestone Fast Six shootout though was the more difficult part of qualifications for the Indy Grand Prix of Sonoma.
Power posted a quick lap of 1 minute, 16.5282 seconds with 1:20 left in the 10-minute session on the 2.303-mile, 12-turn Infineon Raceway natural-terrain circuit to claim the pole for the 75-lap race. Helio Castroneves (1:16.5652), the 2008 race winner, will join his Team Penske teammate on the front row.
Dario Franchitti (1:16.9437), last year’s race winner who enters the race 42 points behind Power in the championship standings, will share Row 2 with Alex Tagliani (1:17.2068). Ryan Briscoe (1:17.2109) and Scott Dixon (1:17.3470), who extended his series-record streak to 45 consecutive top-10 starts, will be on the third row.
The first three rows almost didn’t include Power for the first time in the nine road/street course races.
With a minute left in Round 2 of qualifying, Power was on the outside of advancing by four-tenths of a second to Justin Wilson of Dreyer & Reinbold Racing.
“I knew it was going to be really tight,” said Power, referencing two practice sessions in which the top 16 cars in each were separated by less than a second. “We took a risk in the second session and almost didn’t get through. Us not getting through that second round would have been a disaster.
“I set a time on old tires I thought would get me through, went out and did a slow lap (on a new set of Firestone alternate tires). I said on the radio, ‘You guys have to tell me, do you want me to go or not?’ They said, ‘Pit, because it looked fine.’ Suddenly, heaps of people went across the line and I went down to seventh.”
He had one lap to get in — on tires that weren’t up to temperature on a blustery day in the Sonoma Valley.
“Halfway around that lap on my dash I was two-tenths down,” Power said. ”I figured I’m done. It’s going to be tough to make that up. But I made it up, which was surprising. It was very tight.”
The lap of 1:16.8072 put him fourth of the six advancing to the final round.
“It is important that we start up front here,” said Power, who has started on the front row for six consecutive races. ”This is the toughest series I have ever raced in. It is just so tight now. You can’t leave anything on the table.”
Wilson, who didn’t leave anything on the track in the No. 22 Z-Line Designs entry, was left in the cold by 0.0088 of a second. He’ll start seventh and be on Row 4 with Ryan Hunter-Reay of Andretti Autosport. Eight different teams were represented in the top 12.
Tagliani was making his second appearance (the first since the opener in mid-March in Brazil) in the Firestone Fast Six. The effort followed his leading 30 laps and finishing a season-best fourth at Mid-Ohio on Aug. 8.
“Obviously, our challenge as a team is to try to play catch-up from a lack of information, preparation between the races,” said Tagliani of the first-year team. ”But at some point, what we’re trying to do as a team is just to make sure that when we roll our car out of the trailer, it’s good.
“We kind of changed our philosophy a little bit in Mid-Ohio in the middle of the weekend. We struggled on road courses. We found something pretty interesting. We kept with it. Now we’re back on track. The car is definitely good because when you come here for the first time, it’s a pretty challenging track. So I think the team has done a good job.”
