IndyCar - MidOhio: Scott Dixon takes pole with new track record
Scott Dixon, driving the No. 9 Target Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet, takes pole position for Sunday’s Honda Indy 200 race at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. In 10-minute qualifying session Dixon recorded a best lap of 1:04.5814, which is a new laptime record at 2.258-mile track. Eleven drivers overall recorded laps quicker than the former record of Dario Franchiti and Gil de Ferran, which was set twice in 1999 and 2000.
“It’s great that the Target car has a lot of speed, but as you saw last year with us winning from the last row that anything can happen. We can’t really race for the championship right now. We have to race for wins. It is hard with that mind-set when you get close. There are 200 and something points on the table. We’ve been strong all year, but we haven’t got the results that we wanted. We’ll see what we can do,” said Dixon, who has won five of the past eight Verizon IndyCar Series races at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course and enters the race third in the championship standings. Dixon won last year’s race after starting at the rear of the 22-car grid.
Reigning Verizon IndyCar Series champion Will Power, driving the No. 1 Verizon Team Penske Chevrolet, will join Dixon on the front row. Sebastien Bourdais, the pole sitter for the 2014 race at Mid-Ohio, and Helio Castroneves will be on row 2. Josef Newgarden, a two-time winner this season, and Charlie Kimball, who won at Mid-Ohio in 2013, will share row 3. Verizon IndyCar Series championship points leader Juan Pablo Montoya (Team Penske) will start 10th.
“To be honest, it’s taken a lot of hard work by everyone on the team to get to where we are. We had a problem with the engine yesterday and lost almost an entire practice session. Since then we have just been behind. We’ve been trying to catch up and we improved a lot this morning. We were seventh in the morning session and qualified 10th. I just had a too much understeer in the first round and we didn’t adjust enough in the second round,” Montoya said.
Photo: indycar.com
