Race Weekend Central

Josef Newgarden Claims IndyCar Pole in Detroit

In the final qualifying session around Detroit’s Belle Isle circuit, Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden became the seventh different polesitter in seven NTT INDYCAR Series races this season.

Newgarden played spoiler in a Firestone Fast 6 dominated by the two-car teams of Dale Coyne Racing and Meyer Shank Racing, laying down a lap time of 1:15.2153 to beat Takuma Sato by just over a tenth of a second.

See also
2022 IndyCar Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix Preview

Meyer Shank Racing teammates Simon Pagenaud and Helio Castroneves will share the second row, with Pato O’Ward taking the green flag in fifth. David Malukas, the top-finishing rookie in last week’s Indy 500, backed up his impressive turn of pace at the Brickyard by making the Firestone Fast 6 for the first time on the way to his best career IndyCar start of sixth.

Firestone Fast 6 Results:

  1. Josef Newgarden
  2. Takuma Sato
  3. Simon Pagenaud
  4. Helio Castroneves
  5. Pato O’Ward
  6. David Malukas

A hard crash for Romain Grosjean brought out a somewhat early end to the Firestone Fast 12. The Andretti Autosport driver bounced the left-rear of his No. 28 off the wall on corner exit and crashed hard into bare concrete in the next turn mere moments after the checkered flag flew. Grosjean was penalized for causing a red flag that prevented the rest of the Fast 12 qualifiers from finishing their final laps, dropping the Swiss-born Frenchman from 10th to 12th on the starting grid via a penalty of losing his two fastest qualifying laps and not being allowed to advance.

 

Round 1 Group 1 saw a thrilling fight on the bubble, as Conor Daly and rookie Kyle Kirkwood tried to bump Grosjean out of the Firestone Fast 12. Ultimately neither American was successful, and Andretti Autosport’s Swiss Frenchman moved on by just eight hundredths of a second.

A fast Felix Rosenqvist in Group 2 had his best two times deleted for infringing Jimmie Johnson’s progress, knocking the Arrow-McLaren driver out of round two. 

Full Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix Starting Grid

  1. Josef Newgarden
  2. Takuma Sato
  3. Simon Pagenaud
  4. Helio Castroneves
  5. Pato O’Ward
  6. David Malukas
  7. Colton Herta
  8. Marcus Ericsson
  9. Scott Dixon
  10. Scott McLaughlin
  11. Alexander Rossi
  12. Romain Grosjean
  13. Conor Daly
  14. Rinus VeeKay
  15. Kyle Kirkwood
  16. Will Power
  17. Santino Ferrucci
  18. Alex Palou
  19. Christian Lundgaard
  20. Jack Harvey
  21. Devlin DeFrancesco
  22. Jimmie Johnson
  23. Graham Rahal
  24. Tatiana Calderon
  25. Dalton Kellett
  26. Felix Rosenqvist

Coverage of the Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix begins tomorrow (Sunday, June 5) at 3 p.m. EST on USA Network and Peacock.

About the author

Jack Swansey primarily covers open-wheel racing for Frontstretch and co-hosts The Pit Straight Podcast, but you can also catch him writing about NASCAR, sports cars, and anything else with four wheels and a motor. Originally from North Carolina and now residing in Los Angeles, he joined the site as Sunday news writer midway through 2022 and is an avid collector (some would say hoarder) of die-cast cars.

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