ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Josef Newgarden told NBC’s Marty Snider, Friday, in the Mahaffey Theater that despite his Indianapolis 500 victory and wins on all but one oval, he was bummed to not win a pole in 2023.
He rectified that in Race No. 1 of 2024.
“Crazy proud,” he said. “I’m always proud of my team and even more so today. They deserve it. They’ve done a great job all off-season. They’ve done a great job in 2023 (sic), and I feel like we fell short in a lot of areas that we didn’t need to.”
The two-time NTT INDYCAR Series champion scored his 17th career pole with a Firestone Fast Six time of 59.5714 (108.777 mph). He jumped to the top of the charts with just 15 seconds left in the final round. Besting Felix Rosenqvist, who broke Will Power’s track record in the second round.
All of which came after a less than stellar performance in first practice, Friday. Newgarden’s team didn’t change much on the car after first practice.
“We were sort of same car,” he said. “Just really putting it together better, and I think (second practice) was representative more so for where we were as a team.”
Rounding out the top-six are Pato O’Ward, Colton Herta (who ran his fastest time in the final round on Firestone black tires, while the rest used greens*), Romain Grosjean and defending race winner Marcus Ericsson.
Aside from Rinus VeeKay kissing the wall off Turn 10, nothing out of the ordinary happened during qualifying. Gusts of wind dragged debris onto the track, but that wound up a non-factor.
* The green-banded Firestone tires are the same compound as the reds of years past, but with a different construction. How differently it performed was “hard to say.”
“I felt like it was probably more of a lap two, lap three tire than the past,” Rosenqvist said. “I think here last time we were here it was like a lap one tire. It changes all the time kind of depending on the weather and the wind and what not.”
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