'Nice to get some good luck' with pole - Kimball

After six-plus seasons and 109 races, Charlie Kimball can finally celebrate his first pole in the Verizon IndyCar Series – a possibility he didn't consider when he woke up on Friday and saw the weather.

"I got up this morning and saw it raining and thought, oh, man, this looks a lot like last year," he said after setting a track-record one- and two-lap average of 222.556 mph to unseat teammate Scott Dixon's 222.516 mph. "But it was incredible, as soon as the rain stopped the track dryers went to work and it did not take very long to dry. That's a lot of credit to those guys.

Related Stories

"It's pretty fantastic. It feels really, really good actually. The car was pretty good straight out of the trailer for practice, and I think a lot of credit has to go to everyone here at Texas Motor Speedway with the repave, the addition of some drainage, and the reprofiling of [Turns] 1 and 2 over the winter."

After two blown engines so far this season, Kimball sits 19th in points with two top-10s. He hopes to turn his luck around in Texas, where he's had one podium in eight starts.

"If we haven't had bad luck this year, we've had no luck, so it's nice to get some good luck, and honestly, hard work – the guys, I owe them such gratitude because they've been behind me. They've had my back all year long through the good, the bad, the ugly. We haven't really had much great yet this year except for today, so it was nice to pay them back with this pole.

"May was hard. It still hurts. It still keeps me up at night, so it's nice – hopefully I'll sleep a little better tonight having a pole under my belt."

Kimball, who hasn't won since Mid-Ohio in 2013, was able to take advantage by qualifying fourth from last as the third of the four Chip Ganassi Racing cars to qualify, after Tony Kanaan, who will start fourth, and Dixon. Max Chilton starts not far behind in sixth. The team also benefitted from data gathered at Dixon's test at the track in April.

"I think I owe my Honda engineer Eddie a drink tonight, or two, because he gave it all she was going to get, that's for sure," Kimball joked. "I watched Scott run really well at that test in April, and everything he was saying, there was a lot of confidence in the package we had. So even with the differences coming back, the different tire and different stagger, that sort of thing, I knew the engineers would be right on top of it, and I just had to go out and get the most out of it, and I think it showed because I had to make some adjustments for the balance of the car, and I had the confidence to do that and take a fairly big swing at the car for that second lap because I think the first lap wasn't fast enough to beat Scott, but the second lap was.

"I mean, it was, what, four hundredths of a mile an hour average over three miles; that's pretty close, and I think that's an indication of how all four Chip Ganassi Racing cars are built and set up."