Two weeks and one day after Rinus Veekay out-ran and out-strategied Romain Grosjean to win on the Indy road course, we're back again for a faster, scarier, more right-angled experience with the one-hundred-and-fifth running of the greatest remaining spectacle in racing! Time is short so we will stick to the basics: it's happening on Sunday with the green flag flying some time around 12.20pm EST. The pre-race show featuring, I dunno, Rutledge Wood wandering around the Eiteljorg Museum of Native and Western Art, starts on NBCSN that morning at 9am. The tape starts rolling on Sky Sports F1 at 3.45pm BST. That's an hour and a half of Lando Norris, potentially. Is that too much? This and many more questions, such as can Penske win from deep in the field, can Scott Dixon finally win a second champion's ring, can Ed Carpenter etc, will have to be answered, having no alternative, on Sunday!
Here's your starting grid:
Front row: Reigning series champion and 2008 Indy 500 winner Scott Dixon leads them round to the green flag, with a four-lap average of 231.685mph. Minimally slower in the pole shootout was Colton Herta, also Honda-powered but driving for Michael Andretti. Top Chevy is Hoofddorp's finest, Rinus Veekay, starting on the outside of the front row.
Second row: Two part-timers and a sophomore. Indycar's only driver/entrant (er, arguably Marco too) Ed Carpenter starts inside of row 2. His last good run was in the hot and passing-light 2018 edition, where he had a fleet of good cars but nothing for Will Power. 2013 winner and ziggurat-botherer Tony Kanaan starts fifth, and his Ganassi teammate Alex Palou rounds out the second row.
Third row: Ryan Hunter-Reay leads the third row in pleasingly familiar DHL colours. The 2014 winner lines up next to three-time winner Helio Castroneves, whose Andretti-linked Meyer-Shank entry gives him a shot at his first Indy victory since 2009. Huski Chocolate's Marcus Ericsson, Sauber trier in a previous life, starts ninth.
Fourth row: First driver who missed out on the Fast Nine shootout is Alexander Rossi, who won in 2016 on a clever fuel-conscious run and has been making up for it ever since with a series of eye-catching and daring drives. No second win yet but you wouldn't bet against him making his car work on restarts. He's next to returnee Ed Jones, reunited with the Coyne team who got him a third place finish in 2017, and McSchmidt's Pato O'Ward, who is not starting very close to the starter's gantry but is still the third-best qualifier from the Chevrolets.
Fifth row: Minor shocks: Grosjean stand-in Pietro Fittipaldi has put Dale Coyne's second car near his first, Felix Rosenqvist pulled off a similar feat for Sam Schmidt and McLaren's shareholders, and double winner Takuma Sato had an anonymous (for him) run to start fifteenth for Bobby Rahal and co.
Sixth row: The exact midpoint of the midfield contains Andretti's James Hinchcliffe, slowest once again of the four regulars, Scott McLaughlin, shockingly enough Penske's top qualifier, and Graham Rahal, who underlined a disappointing qualifying weekend for Rahal-Letterman-Lanigan.
Seventh row: Conor Daly starts on the inside, decently enough but several rows back from Ed Carpenter's other two entries, Lincolnshire's Jack Harvey and teammate-for-a-day to Helio Castroneves starts 20th, and Josef Newgarden, tipped to win by some presumably nervous Penske boosters, starts on the outside of row number seven. Seven is lucky, right?
Eighth row: Or is eight lucky? We'll all be lucky if these three do well: big characters J.R. Hildebrand (top Foyt), Santino Ferrucci (third Rahal) and Juan Montoya (two-time winner, but third McSchmidt) will be bouncing off each others' fame and notoriety, but have quite a bit of work to do. Tbh from this far back it would be a great result if these guys cracked the top ten.
Ninth row: I would call this the first row of the damned. Marco Andretti leads them round on the inside, 2019 winner and third Penske Simon Pagenaud starts in the middle, and Foyt's Sebastien Bourdais starts outside on this row. There's only one big name starting further back than these big names. But Sunday is for racing. Pagenaud in particular will be looking to make moves, if the conditions and strategy allow it.
Tenth row: The penultimate row contains three drivers who could conceivably (I'm not jinxing) be racing their last Indy, and in lotsa ways it's remarkable that they're here. Especially Stefan Wilson, who put together an Andretti ride (I'm not sure he races the rest of the year), but also Reigate's Max Chilton (ditto) and Canada's Dalton Kellett (ditto ditto). But they all outqualified two Penske cars. Which brings us to...
Last row: Sage Karam looked like he had a good car earlier in practice, but whether that was false confidence, or the speed vanished in qualifying trim, or perhaps it was just a good car compared to some of the others Sage has driven (sometimes briefly), he is leading the grid's tail end. Still, he's also outqualified two Penske cars: 2018 winner Will Power suffered the indignity of having to bump his way in through the last row shoot-out, as did Simona de Silvestro, who has a new owner (Beth Paretta) with a good car that had the misfortune of being a bad qualifying car. What can they hope to do from the back? Survive the first lap, initially.
And finally... make your fantasy picks.
And enjoy the racing! It's set to be a good one: not too hot and some patchy cloud cover. Zero percent chance of precipitation. That's what we want to hear!
I will be catching you all here late in the race.
