Arrow McLaren SP‘s Felix Rosenqvist will start on pole position for tomorrow’s 2022 NTT IndyCar Series XPEL 375 at Texas Motor Speedway. The Swedish driver would beat championship-leader Scott McLaughlin to the top spot by just fourteen-thousandths of a mile an hour, with the top five separated by just one-tenth.
Qualifying at Texas Motor Speedway saw each driver head out in the reverse order of owner’s points for two flying laps, with the fastest average speed across both laps determining who would start on pole position. The track was hot – with temperatures nearing triple figures – and the pace would be hotter still, with the vast majority of drivers averaging speeds of over 220-mph.
Rosenqvist’s #7 Chevrolet would head out on track inside the first half of the session. His two-lap average of 221.110-mph would comfortably put him on top of the time-sheets at the time, but as driver after driver took to the track after him, few could get close to him on the speed charts.
Ultimately, only five drivers would finish the session with a two-lap average in the 221-mph range. Dale Coyne Racing‘s Takuma Sato would be the first to seriously challenge the provisional pole time, but the Japanese driver would fall short by a tiny margin of just sixteen-thousandths of a mile an hour; a ridiculously tight margin.
However, Scott McLaughlin’s qualifying run at the very end of the session would see the New Zealander get even closer than Sato managed! The Team Penske Kiwi would slot into second on the grid, just two-thousandths of a mile an hour faster than Sato and only fourteenth-thousandths off of Rosenqvist.
With his rivals getting so close but yet so far, Rosenqvist would hang on to take his second NTT IndyCar Series pole position; with his first having come back in his rookie year in 2019 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course for Chip Ganassi Racing. After a difficult first year with McLaren last season and a tough first race at St. Petersburg a few weeks ago, Felix will be hoping that his pole position in Texas will begin to put himself back on the right track. Furthermore, he’ll be hoping for a strong race tomorrow at the venue where he came oh so close to victory in 2020 before a late-race accident.
Scott McLaughlin’s strong qualifying continues his superb start to the 2022 season. It should perhaps be no surprise that the sophomore driver looks fast at Texas Motor Speedway given the fact that the Penske driver scored his first IndyCar podium finish in his first oval start at this track last year.
Similarly, Takuma Sato’s third-place in qualifying shouldn’t come as too much of a shock given his pedigree when it comes to oval racing. Despite numerous victories at other ovals, however, Texas remains one place that the Japanese driver has not taken victory at. He will be hoping to change that fact tomorrow in what will be his two-hundredth race start in IndyCar.
Will Power and Scott Dixon would round out the top five of the starting grid, with the pair being the last two drives to qualify inside the 221-mph range. Helio Castroneves would take his #06 Meyer Shank Racing Honda to sixth on the grid, with Josef Newgarden just behind in seventh-place; thus ensuring that all three Penske cars would qualify inside the top eight positions.
Ed Carpenter Racing‘s Rinus VeeKay will line up in eighth-place, with young-guns Colton Herta and Patricio O’Ward just behind on the fifth row of the grid in ninth and tenth respectively. Reigning series champion Alex Palou will start in eleventh place.
Several drivers are making their first-ever starts at Texas Motor Speedway in an IndyCar this weekend. Romain Grosjean will roll off in thirteenth place in the #28 Andretti Autosport Honda. Team-mate Devlin DeFrancesco will start in seventeenth-place, just ahead of eighteenth-placed Jimmie Johnson for Chip Ganassi Racing. Johnson, a seven-time winner at Texas in the NASCAR Cup Series, will make his first oval start in IndyCar tomorrow and will be hoping that his years of oval racing experience in stock cars transfer over to the world of single-seaters.
David Malukas will start in nineteenth-place for his first IndyCar oval start with Dale Coyne. He narrowly out-qualified British driver Callum Ilott for Juncos Hollinger Racing in twentieth-place who, unlike David, has never raced on an oval in any category.
Ilott’s fellow F2 graduate, Christian Lundgaard, was the lowest classified driver out of those making their Texas debuts tomorrow. The Dane will start in twenty-fifth place in the #30 Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing Honda. It was an uncharacteristically shocking day for the RLLR team, with Lundgaard’s team-mates Jack Harvey and Graham Rahal qualifying in twenty-fourth and twenty-seventh respectively as all three struggled to find speed on the race track. It would be a similarly difficult day for the three A.J. Foyt Racing cars, with Dalton Kellett, Kyle Kirkwood and J.R. Hildebrand (racing in Tatiana Calderon‘s #11 Chevrolet), qualifying in twenty-second, twenty-third and twenty-sixth.
XPEL 375 – Qualifying Results
| RANK | CAR NO. | DRIVER | NAT | TEAM | AVERAGE LAP SPEED (MPH) |
| 1 | 7 | Felix Rosenqvist | SWE | Arrow Mclaren SP | 221.110 |
| 2 | 3 | Scott McLaughlin | NZL | Team Penske | 221.096 |
| 3 | 51 | Takuma Sato | JAP | Dale Coyne Racing w/ Rick Ware | 221.094 |
| 4 | 12 | Will Power | AUS | Team Penske | 221.016 |
| 5 | 9 | Scott Dixon | NZL | Chip Ganassi Racing | 221.011 |
| 6 | 06 | Helio Castroneves | BRA | Meyer Shank Racing | 220.768 |
| 7 | 2 | Josef Newgarden | USA | Team Penske | 220.758 |
| 8 | 21 | Rinus VeeKay | NET | Ed Carpenter Racing | 220.748 |
| 9 | 26 | Colton Herta | USA | Andretti Autosport | 220.602 |
| 10 | 5 | Patricio O’Ward | MEX | Arrow McLaren SP | 220.579 |
| 11 | 10 | Alex Palou | ESP | Chip Ganassi Racing | 220.571 |
| 12 | 27 | Alexander Rossi | USA | Andretti Autosport | 220.458 |
| 13 | 28 | Romain Grosjean | FRA | Andretti Autosport | 220.412 |
| 14 | 8 | Marcus Ericsson | SWE | Chip Ganassi Racing | 220.364 |
| 15 | 60 | Simon Pagenaud | FRA | Meyer Shank Racing | 220.338 |
| 16 | 20 | Conor Daly | USA | Ed Carpenter Racing | 219.987 |
| 17 | 29 | Devlin DeFrancesco (R) | CAN | Andretti Autosport | 219.888 |
| 18 | 48 | Jimmie Johnson | USA | Chip Ganassi Racing | 219.865 |
| 19 | 18 | David Malukas (R) | USA | Dale Coyne Racing w/ HMD Motorsports | 219.864 |
| 20 | 77 | Callum Ilott (R) | GBR | Juncos Hollinger Racing | 219.462 |
| 21 | 33 | Ed Carpenter | USA | Ed Carpenter Racing | 219.212 |
| 22 | 4 | Dalton Kellett | CAN | A.J. Foyt Racing | 219.038 |
| 23 | 14 | Kyle Kirkwood (R) | USA | A.J. Foyt Racing | 219.013 |
| 24 | 45 | Jack Harvey | GBR | Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing | 218.781 |
| 25 | 30 | Christian Lundgaard (R) | DEN | Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing | 218.687 |
| 26 | 11 | J.R. Hildebrand | USA | A.J. Foyt Racing | 218.584 |
| 27 | 15 | Graham Rahal | USA | Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing | 218.410 |
