{"id":14767,"date":"2023-06-18T08:00:26","date_gmt":"2023-06-18T12:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/?p=14767"},"modified":"2023-08-27T10:46:44","modified_gmt":"2023-08-27T14:46:44","slug":"indycar-colton-herta-recovers-takes-pole-at-road-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/2023\/06\/18\/indycar-colton-herta-recovers-takes-pole-at-road-america\/","title":{"rendered":"IndyCar: Colton Herta Recovers, Takes Pole At Road America"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3>After today&#8217;s practice session troubles for Colton Herta, this has to be bittersweet following two spins and a red flag today.<\/h3>\n<p>After two spins and a red flag during today&#8217;s second practice session, Colton Herta was able to regain his composure and grab pole for Sunday&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/2023\/06\/15\/indycar-road-america-predictions-and-how-to-watch\/\" target=\"_self\">Sonsio Grand Prix at Road America<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Herta, with a quick lap of 1:40.1945 captured his 10th career pole and his first since Toronto in July 2022.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019ve been working at it the whole time,\u201d Herta said. \u201cThis place with the repave is not easy. To have a car that was stable enough to really attack in that last Fast Six was impressive. It\u2019s been way too long this year for us to get a pole, so it\u2019s nice to finally get one.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>When asked during the post qualifying press conference about grabbing the pole, Herta responded, &#8220;First off, it&#8217;s good to be back in here. I forgot what a media center looked like, I&#8217;ve been qualifying so poorly.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Yeah, it feels nice to be back, kind of on form. Our qualifying&#8217;s have been kind of lackluster the last few weekends. Luckily we put it all together today and ended up on the pole.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Super happy. The car was great. Happy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Joining Herta on the front row is Arrow McLaren driver <strong>Pato O&#8217;Ward<\/strong> in his No. 5 Chevrolet who was just .16 seconds behind Herta with a lap of 1:40.3643.<\/p>\n<p>During the post qualifying press conference, O&#8217;Ward was asked about expectations for tomorrow and O&#8217;Ward answered &#8220;I don&#8217;t know, man. I think obviously the following will be different to what it&#8217;s been in the last few years just because offline, the balance, the car just turns upside down if you go offline.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think that&#8217;s obviously going to make passing tricky. It will make guys trying to get a bit of cleaner air on at least half of their wing. There is a penalty to pay for that. It doesn&#8217;t seem to pay off yet.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Yeah, I see it being there&#8217;s maybe a lane and a half of, like, very high grip. But you go off of that, and it&#8217;s like ice. I think that&#8217;s also why there&#8217;s just been a lot of excursions. You miss it by just a tad, and it&#8217;s like, What happened to the car?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;To extract the lap time, especially now with the new pavement, like there is so much more grip, but it&#8217;s only in the line. You have to commit so much into the corners where a lot of the times it kind of bites once you&#8217;re already committed. I think that&#8217;s why you see a lot of spins, a lot of guys going off, just a lot of random snaps. It makes you feel like there&#8217;s unlimited amounts of grip, but there&#8217;s obviously limits to everything.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Earlier in today&#8217;s practice session, two series mainstays collided, causing heavy damage to both their cars. Two-time series and reigning champion <strong>Will Power<\/strong>\u00a0will start 22nd, and six-time series champion <a href=\"https:\/\/www.indycar.com\/Series\/IndyCar-Series\/Scott-Dixon\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><strong>Scott Dixon<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0will roll off P23.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Up Next:\u00a0<\/strong>Warm-Up: Sunday, 10:15 a.m EST on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.peacocktv.com\/watch\/home?orig_ref=direct\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Peacock<\/a><\/p>\n<h5>Featured Image Credit: Chris Jones\/Penske Entertainment<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After today&#8217;s practice session troubles for Colton Herta, this has to be bittersweet following two spins and a red flag today. After two spins and a red flag during today&#8217;s second practice session, Colton Herta was able to regain his composure and grab pole for Sunday&#8217;s Sonsio Grand Prix at Road America. Herta, with a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4580,"featured_media":14773,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"Qualifications","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"1","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"300","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,1663],"tags":[1833,1154,634,1661],"class_list":["post-14767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-indycar","category-ntt-indycar-series","tag-2023-ntt-data-indycar-series","tag-colton-herta","tag-road-america","tag-sonsio-grand-prix-at-road-america"],"modified_by":"Nathan Reynolds","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4580"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}