After a disastrous start to the 2021 season at Barber Motorsports Park, Colton Herta qualified the No. 26 Andretti w/ Curb-Agajanian on the pole Saturday afternoon with a time of 1.00.3210 and 107.425 mph over another Andretti affiliate driver Jack Harvey. Herta was 0.2499 seconds ahead of Harvey to gain the Valencia, California native his fifth career NTT IndyCar Series pole.
“Yeah, it’s been going good so far,” Herta said. “We’ve shown strong pace all weekend. Haven’t been outside of the top four in any session. Really all the Andretti cars have been really strong for most of the weekend. So, yeah, happy to get the pole obviously. Happy to get it with Dan Towriss here with Gainbridge and happy to be part of Honda. It’s going to be an awesome race tomorrow, interesting, two-stop. I need to do more research on that tonight.”
By securing the pole position, Herta now shares the pole with his dad Bryan (Herta) who won the pole back in 2005.
Qualifying featured another wild session for the weekend. Originally, the session was slated to go green at 1:45 p.m./ET but was briefly delayed for five minutes for course repair due to the previous on-track action. As Round 1, segment 1 went green, there was an incident that involved the No. 28 of Ryan Hunter-Reay and the No. 9 of Scott Dixon. Dixon ended up spinning around in Turn 8, causing a local yellow. Dixon was handed a penalty but was still able to advance in qualifying. Advancing out of the first group were Alexander Rossi, Colton Herta, Pato O’Ward, Simon Pagenaud, Sebastien Bourdais, and Scott Dixon.
Group 2 of qualifying saw the most interesting action. Officials reviewed an incident between the No. 21 of Rinus VeeKay and the No. 4 of Dalton Kellett. Kellett’s day got worse as he was penalized again for causing a qualifying interference. This meant Kellett lost his two fastest laps and not advance into further sessions. Kellett was penalized earlier in the day for being late to the drivers weigh in and lost 10 minutes of practice time.
Meanwhile, a few other incidents occurred as well. Will Power and the No. 12 Team Penske Verizon machine ended up spinning around in the last corner of the last turn in the final remaining minutes of the first session. IndyCar officials reviewed the spin but determined no action necessary. This was the first time since July of 2019 at Toronto, where Power would not advance to a second segment and the first time in his IndyCar career that the Aussie did not make the fast six at St. Pete.
When the final round of qualifying went green for the Firestone Fast Six, the top spot changed hands multiple times with Jack Harvey challenging for pole position late in the session. However, the pole ultimately went to Herta who edged out Harvey and gave Andretti Autosport their 44th career NTT IndyCar Series pole.
Despite Harvey missing out on the top spot, the starting spot is Harvey’s best since Road America last summer where he started second.
“Yeah, really great day,” Harvey said about the qualifying effort. “I think we made some good changes overnight. We had a really good practice two. From what the guys said, we looked good on blacks, looked good on reds. Obviously didn’t quite have enough to challenge for pole. I thought we did there for a little bit, but then they said Colton had done a 3. At that point I knew we already peaked. I actually thought the 5 in Q3 was a really good time. Just kind of catching the tail end of Colton’s comments, I was actually surprised how close the Q3 time was to the best that anyone saw on new reds. It will be interesting overnight.”
A 30 minute warm-up session is scheduled for 9:05 a.m./ET live on Peacock with the Firestone Grand Prix at St. Pete green-flag scheduled for 12:42 p.m./ET live on NBC.
Official Starting Line Up for the Firestone Grand Prix at St. Pete:
- (26) Colton Herta, Honda, 01:00.3210 (107.425 mph)
- (60) Jack Harvey, Honda, 01:00.5709 (106.982)
- (2) Josef Newgarden, Chevrolet, 01:00.6078 (106.917)
- (22) Simon Pagenaud, Chevrolet, 01:00.6353 (106.868)
- (14) Sebastien Bourdais, Chevrolet, 01:01.0017 (106.227)
- (5) Pato O’Ward, Chevrolet, 01:01.0799 (106.091)
- (21) Rinus VeeKay, Chevrolet, 01:00.4858 (107.133)
- (9) Scott Dixon, Honda, 01:00.4997 (107.108)
- (15) Graham Rahal, Honda, 01:00.5678 (106.988)
- (10) Alex Palou, Honda, 01:00.6220 (106.892)
- (27) Alexander Rossi, Honda, 01:00.6476 (106.847)
- (29) James Hinchcliffe, Honda, 01:00.8671 (106.461)
- (28) Ryan Hunter-Reay, Honda, 01:00.8524 (106.487)
- (3) Scott McLaughlin, Chevrolet, 01:00.7044 (106.747)
- (30) Takuma Sato, Honda, 01:00.9167 (106.375)
- (8) Marcus Ericsson, Honda, 01:00.7058 (106.744)
- (7) Felix Rosenqvist, Chevrolet, 01:00.9569 (106.305)
- (51) Romain Grosjean, Honda, 01:00.8127 (106.557)
- (20) Conor Daly, Chevrolet, 01:01.4220 (105.500)
- (12) Will Power, Chevrolet, 01:01.1140 (106.031)
- (18) Ed Jones, Honda, 01:01.4453 (105.460)
- (59) Max Chilton, Chevrolet, 01:01.5065 (105.355)
- (48) Jimmie Johnson, Honda, 01:01.8364 (104.793)
- (4) Dalton Kellett, Chevrolet, 01:02.3396 (103.947)
