Palou “always surprised” after fifth straight IndyCar pole

Credit: Paul Hurley

Álex Palou took his fifth consecutive pole position award on Saturday afternoon at the Road America track in Wisconsin.

Palou’s pole at the Indy Grand Prix last month started what is now the Spanish driver’s longest run of consecutive poles in his career to date. The past two, at Gateway and now Road America, marked his first time being on pole at those tracks.

Even after five consecutive poles, Palou was still surprised to have gotten the job done this afternoon.

“Yeah, it was so tough,” he commented. “Q1 I felt great. Q2 I struggled a ton. Yesterday I felt great, but this morning I struggled, as well.

“Yeah, I knew it was going to be very tough to piece it together. My lap, it felt good. There's always room to improve. You never know if there's going to be someone that just pieces together even better than you. It's always surprising. It's always so fun and so tough to get it right. I think everything is so tight that, yeah, still surprises.”

“It's the good thing and bad thing about sports: you cannot relax every single second; you need to keep on working on everything, otherwise everybody is going to catch up. Yeah, feels good.”

While Palou has never been on pole position at Road America before, he’s no stranger to winning at this historic track. In fact, he’s won it three times, and is currently tied with Mario Andretti, Michael Andretti and Emerson Fittipaldi for the most wins at Road America. If he wins tomorrow and takes his fourth win, he’ll move ahead of them in the record books.

“It's super special,” said Palou, speaking about the record he already holds. “It's very cool to hear that, especially those names. I think all the names you said there are huge legends in the sport. But at the end of the day it doesn't really change much. Like, I feel it's super cool obviously. I would love to have that in our CV when I retire.

“It's hard. It's hard to get. Hopefully we can get it. I'm sure if we get it, someone else in 10 years or five or six will get us, as well. It's cool.”

Car setup and tyre concerns

Credit: Joe Skibinski

At any given day on an IndyCar weekend, there are a lot of variables to consider. From Friday to Saturday, Palou had changed the setup of his No.10 Chip Ganassi Racing car, but then changed it back before qualifying.

“We came with one car,” Palou said. “Obviously we worked a little bit yesterday during practice. We thought we were going one direction, and that it was going to be hopefully better or easier to drive this morning. It was the opposite. We just went back. Luckily it was good. I think the track not evolving too much, it kind of made our qualifying easier on going back on setup.”

Road America is the longest track on the IndyCar calendar, and getting the setup right can make an even bigger difference in qualifying due to how long a lap is. Speaking to DIVEBOMB yesterday, Team Penske’s David Malukas cited a good qualifying lap as the biggest challenge of the weekend, due to the length of the track and how long it takes to reset if you make a mistake.

Echoing the sentiment, Palou said: “It's a very tough course, being so long, it's very tough to piece everything together. If you don't have a car that's super comfortable, you could be losing six tenths, seven tenths. You could be way off. Once you have a car that's good, you can see the swing [Malukas] did from yesterday to today.”

A driver’s setup will dictate how they perform throughout the lap, and getting it right is the key to a good qualifying. Once a driver is in a place where they’re happy with the car, driving on a track like Road America goes from miserable to fun.

“It's very tough,” said Palou, speaking about the Road America track. “It depends on which car balance I have. This morning I hated the car because I could not make it turn. Then when I added front wing, I kind of turned too much. It's very tough.

“I would say once you get it right, the Carrousel, it's very fun. We're not flat out. We're not lifting too much. You're just controlling with the throttle. As the driver, when you have a great balance, you can control it, it's an incredible feeling.”

Another variable, this one mostly out of a driver or team’s control, is the tyres. Depending on track conditions, the weather and the car, different types of tyres can behave very differently.

Arrow McLaren’s Pato O’Ward experienced this issue in qualifying, where he used one more set of the soft tyres than the rest of the field but still struggled to get a good time in and ultimately qualified 10th.

Speaking after qualifying, O’Ward said: “The tyres have been so wonky from one set to another, the car has transformed completely from using two sets of softs… It’s very strange, very very strange, we knew this soft tyre was already working quite weird compared to where the prime was. 

“I genuinely thought we had more to give there to fight at least, but I was just skating out there. The car was sliding around a lot and I don’t really think the track has changed so much in order to have those issues as exponential as they were.”

When asked about Pato’s comment and the behavior of the tyres, Palou thought that the softer alternate tyres were a good improvement compared to the prime harder tyres, though he noted that it had been an issue in practice on Friday.

“No, honestly I think yesterday pretty much I would say 90% or maybe even more people thought that the alternates were not a big jump, like there were so many people that barely improved. There were some others that made huge gains.

“Today I think almost everyone, even Pato, he went on Practice 2 just to try and keep another set of primaries. He was P1. You could see that that was a better tire or a faster tire… I think yesterday yes, but today it was pretty clear that the alternates were better.”

Palou will be hunting his fifth win of the season and his fourth win at Road America tomorrow afternoon, with the race beginning at 13:20 local time in Wisconsin.