IndyCar's 2 championship contenders to start from front at Laguna Seca: 'I think it's great.'

Indianapolis Star

18 hours ago

Alex Palou captured his fifth pole of the 2025 IndyCar season, extending his championship lead over Pato O'Ward to 100 points.
O'Ward will make a career-best start at the track Sunday on the outside of the front row, setting up an intriguing title battle.
Like he did in Sunday's race on the streets of Toronto, Pato O'Ward and his No. 5 Arrow McLaren crew executed Saturday in qualifying for Sunday's race at Laguna Seca in what's become do-or-die territory for the driver and team who might need a miracle to be able to seriously challenge for an IndyCar championship come next month's season-finale at Nashville Superspeedway.
But unlike Sunday at Toronto, Alex Palou and Chip Ganassi Racing shined, too.
The final two realistic title contenders will start Sunday's 95-lap race at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca sharing the front row, with Palou extending his championship lead over O'Ward back to triple digits from 99 to 100 with the single bonus point awarded for taking his fifth IndyCar pole of 2025 at the track he won from pole at a year ago.
In four career starts at the central California track, O'Ward had recorded a pair of Fast Six appearances, a career-best start at the track of fifth and had started no worse than ninth, but the 26-year-old Mexican driver had finished no better than fifth either — ultimately a solid but not overly impressive resume.
In contrast, Palou has started all over the front half of the field in his four career starts — fourth, 11th, fifth and first — but he's never finished off the podium, with a pair of wins coming in 2022 and '24 to go with a runner-up in 2021 and third in 2023.
And so as O'Ward and his team knew entering last weekend's Toronto street race, not only do they need to turn the tables on past results — something they did both on strategy smarts and raw speed in Toronto — but they also likely need Palou and his No. 10 crew to stumble, too, in order to make up valuable points to give themselves a reasonable chance with three races to go to challenge the two-time defending champs for the Astor Cup.
With Palou's comfortable margin in Saturday's Fast Six — 0.2867 seconds back to O'Ward in second — it's clear more needs to be found overnight by the No. 5 crew.
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'It's my best start here, so I'll take that,' O'Ward said participating in just his second Fast Six session of 2025, the other leading to pole at The Thermal Club in March. 'Alex just did a really strong lap. My qualifying was a bit more scrappy, especially from (Round 2 to Round 3). I found four-tenths, but I needed two more to be closer.
'It just makes it that much harder whenever the (driver) you're trying to beat is having as good of days or better. But it just makes us push even harder, and I think it's going to be a great opposition and view going into Turn 2.'
Palou made a point to note that after starting last year's Laguna Seca race on pole, he lost the lead by Turn 2, but he'd ultimately ride strategy and speed back to the front to lead 48 of 95 laps and a cushion at the checkered flag of nearly 2 seconds.
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The championship leader said he's looking forward to Sunday's battle with his lone serious title contender with whom he'll share the front row.
'I always think that it's better to have your closest competitor close. You want to be on kind of the same strategy, and you want to know — I think when you have somebody starting like 17th, it might look good on paper today, but then suddenly they do a crazy strategy and they cycle to the front, and you have, like, no chance to fight for it on track,' Palou said. 'I think it's great. I think it's good. It's for sure making it more challenging and more interesting for everybody. Honestly, I like it.'
'It's just so random and bizarre':
Elsewhere throughout the front of the field, two-time Laguna Seca race winner Colton Herta will start on the inside of the second row in third with a trio of Team Penske, or Penske-affiliated, drivers trailing him in Josef Newgarden (fourth), Will Power (fifth) and David Malukas (sixth). O'Ward's teammate Christian Lundgaard will start seventh, followed by the Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing duo of Graham Rahal (eighth) and Louis Foster (ninth), with Meyer Shank Racing's Marcus Armstrong (10th) rounding out the top 10.
Other notables from qualifying include Felix Rosenqvist in 12th, Scott McLaughlin in 13th, Marcus Ericsson in 15th, Kyle Kirkwood in 18th and Scott Dixon in 20th.