IndyCar: Sonoma qualifying crucial for title contenders

Nine Verizon IndyCar Series races have been held at Sonoma Raceway, and all nine have been won by drivers starting inside the top-5. Eight wins have been taken by drivers starting third or better, and the Grand Prix of Sonoma has been won from pole on five occasions. The message is clear for the few drivers left with realistic chances of winning the title in 2014: Saturday's run for the Firestone Fast 6 qualifying carries more importance than possibly any other qualifying session this season.

If Helio Castroneves, Simon Pagenaud and Ryan Hunter-Reay – the drivers chasing championship leader Will Power – happen to miss the Fast 6, their chances of scoring 50 points for the win, along with their championship aspirations, will likely suffer a major setback. With the title in mind, the pressure to earn the pole at Sonoma will be particularly intense.

"Yes, absolutely, it's really important," said Power, who leads Penske teammate Castroneves by 39 points. "Sonoma and Mid-Ohio are tracks where it's very difficult to pass and you must qualify well. It's not like a street course where you can recover if you have a bad qualifying; at Sonoma, you have to qualify up front."

Sonoma is a two-day affair for IndyCar activities that will see teams practice twice on Saturday before heading into qualifying later in the afternoon. Compared to a normal three-day road course event, teams and drivers won't have Friday to practice, evaluate changes and improvements overnight, and return Saturday to perfect those updates prior to qualifying.

"The weekend is compressed compared to usual; we don't run on Friday, so we don't have as much time to practice and Sonoma is a very difficult track to get right," said Pagenaud who holds third in the standings, 92 points back from Power. "It's a big change, and if you don't get it right, you don't have much time to figure it out before you have to qualify so that's hard for everyone.

"And another big change is we won't have double-file restarts, so that will make passing on restarts really tough at Sonoma. You want to use those to attack and gain positions, but since that won't really happen, qualifying is mega-important."

Sonoma Raceway is known for its worn, polished track surface, which makes lapping the 2.3-mile road course a slippery experience. Combined with gusts of wind that can induce understeer or snap oversteer when cresting the hilly circuit, Sonoma's unpredictable conditions make passing nearly impossible at the front of the field and could influence how some teams approach their workload prior to qualifying.

"All we ever do on the road courses is work on fast setups; we don't really try race setups until the warm-up on Sunday," Power explained. "You'll just be doing the normal stuff trying to make the car good – nothing should really change."

"It's all going to be about qualifying and getting that one lap right," added Pagenaud. "It's about preparing well and going into the weekend with a very set approach – a program you've already talked about and run through in a test-like situation. Check the boxes on which items do or don't work, choose what makes the car better and go from there. It makes things work much faster going through the solutions for each problem before you go qualify."

Approximately half of the IndyCar Series paddock tested at Sonoma in February, and more teams made the trek to take part in a second test earlier this month. The multiple test days led IndyCar to pare one day of running off the event schedule, and according to Power and Pagenaud, there's a definite advantage on which test date was chosen by each team.

"For us, yeah, it was beneficial to just be there testing a little while ago," Power noted. "Penske's always been good at Sonoma. Even when we haven't been competitive, we've had good days. Because of that test, we've found some good stuff that had been missing, but we were also there with Andretti and Ganassi, so I'm sure they also learned stuff."

Pagenaud's Schmidt Peterson Motorsports team elected to skip the recent Sonoma test in favor of getting ready for the championship finale at Fontana.

"I think it does matter," said Pagenaud of those who tested on the 11-turn road course. "The guys who were just there will have a better feel for what the track will be like. It's a big time in the IndyCar schedule, so the more comfortable you are – anything you can do to find a few hundredths of a second, the better you are.

"We chose not to go and instead to test at Chicago to prepare for Fontana. We feel that was the right choice for us and we're focused on being within striking distance [of Power] leading into the last race. I'm confident in my team and we'll be doing everything humanly possible to score maximum points this weekend."​