LEBANON, Tenn. — Alex Palou’s poor qualifying run and pending engine penalty tightened the IndyCar championship race the day before the season finale at Nashville Superspeedway.
The title fight is between Palou and Will Power — Power’s Team Penske teammate Scott McLaughlin will be mathematically eliminated as soon as Palou starts Sunday’s race — but with a 33-point cushion in the standings Palou feels pretty confident about winning a third IndyCar title in four years.
Well, at least before Saturday qualifying.
He already knew that IndyCar had given him a nine-place penalty on the grid for an unapproved engine change, so his qualifying run needed to be really strong to salvage any sort of decent starting position.
But in a rare bad day for the Chip Ganassi Racing driver, his run was slow and he was displayed as 15th on the timing and scoring tower. Once the penalty is applied, Palou will drop back to 24th for Sunday’s start.
Power, meanwhile, qualified fourth. And so as the race begins, based on the position that both title contenders will be in, the “points as they run” will show Palou’s lead in the standings shrunk to the low teens.
Either way, Palou can still win the championship by finishing ninth or better. It would be back-to-back titles for the Spaniard, who also won the championship in 2021 in his first season with Ganassi.
“Yeah, that wasn’t ideal,” Palou said after qualifying. He said the car was far more comfortable in morning practice and his No. 10 crew will try to figure out went wrong before Saturday’s final practice session.
“The first lap wasn’t so bad. The second lap was just really, really bad,” Palou said. “Not what we wanted. Not what we needed. But, yeah, we need to move from 24th tomorrow.”
Although IndyCar raced at Nashville Superspeedway from 2001 through 2008, Palou had never been on the track before Saturday. Nashville will be the first concrete oval race of his career.
Power finished 11th in his only career race at the superspeedway, the 2008 final visit. He was grinning as he watched Palou’s qualifying run from pit road.
“That’s as good as I could do right there. I can never ask for more than that,” Power said. “Would have been nice to get a pole, but that’s life. Just do what we can in the race tomorrow, you know how these things roll. If it’s our day, it will be our day. If not, we’ll try again next year.”
Power is a two-time IndyCar champion, with his 2022 title sandwiched by Palou’s pair of crowns.
This race was supposed to be run in downtown Nashville for a fourth consecutive year, but race promoter Scott Borchetta and Big Machine Label Group moved it to the superspeedway because of disruptive construction on the Tennessee Titans’ new stadium. The downtown event had been so popular that IndyCar gifted it the season finale, and the street race was being billed as one of the biggest events on this year’s schedule.
But when Borchetta got a look at the the course revisions required to avoid the construction, he found the plan to be unfeasible. He already had moved the race to Speedway Motorsports-owned Nashville Superspeedway when the NFL schedule was released, and with the Titans set to host the Jets on Sunday, Borchetta said he would have had to cancel the finale outright if it was still scheduled to go head-to-head downtown with an NFL game.
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