
Photo: Chris Owens
Andretti Global locked out the top three places in Indy Nxt’s first oval qualifying session of the season at Iowa Speedway, and feel confident going into Saturday’s race.
James Roe Jr claimed his maiden pole with a two-lap average speed of 170.625mph, just 0.024mph faster than team-mate Louis Foster. Oval racing debutant Jamie Chadwick was third fastest, 0.0527 seconds off the pole time.
Having qualified fourth at Iowa last year, Roe was confident heading into this weekend despite the in-season test at the track being rained off and therefore meaning the first oval mileage of the year came just a few hours before qualifying in the extended – but heavily disrupted – practice session.
Roe felt the “first lap was a little slow” on his qualifying run, but despite that reckoned that since Andretti’s “quali car is mega” he was still going to be near when he completed his timed two laps.
“I mean, we’ve got high standards here at Andretti. But yeah, it was wide open for the whole run. Car’s mega. Obviously practice we didn’t know what we were dealing with,” he said after setting a new track record. “Here we are, we’ve got a rocket ship. let’s get the job done tomorrow.”
Looking ahead to the race, Roe added: “I think we’re in a great spot [with our race car]. We didn’t blister any tyres in practice.”
The blistering was a big problem for many in practice, since drivers were on track for 20 or more laps at a time rather than just three (as the qualifying runs feature a warm-up lap). The planned race distance is 75 laps, a length several deemed impossible after finding the lifespan of their tyres did not even reach a third of that distance in practice.
“We as a team did a really good job of adapting to what was thrown at us. Andretti did an amazing job,” said Foster post-qualifying.
“We got three of our cars in the top three. So obviously super happy with qualifying. I don’t know how the race is going to play out. I don’t think anyone really knows what we’re going to do for the race tomorrow. See how the degradation is with the tyres, and hopefully we can get full race distance in… but at the moment it doesn’t look likely, to be honest with you.
“But we’ll see. Hopefully we can. But obviously super happy, way ahead of any [championship] competition I have. So I think we should have a good one [in the race].”
Foster’s two main title rivals Jacob Abel (Abel Motorsports) and Caio Collet (HMD Motorsports) were only able to qualify seventh and 12th, with Collet 0.6757s off pole on what was his first ever qualifying session on an oval.