By David Morgan, Associate Editor
NASHVILLE – It’s just been Scott McLaughlin’s day in Nashville.
After leading the way in practice to kick off the day, the driver of the No. 3 Team Penske Chevrolet laid down a flying lap in the last few seconds of qualifying for the Big Machine Music City Grand Prix to score his second pole of the season with a lap of one minute, 14.555 seconds.
The last time McLaughlin won the pole at St. Pete to start the season, he came away as the victor. He has the same car he won with at his disposal this weekend and is making his presence known.
“I’ll tell you what, this DEX car is really good, man,” McLaughlin said. “Like we’ve been going really fast with it. Won the St. Pete opener with it, won at Mid-Ohio when those guys were in those suits, and now we’re on pole at Nashville, which is an amazing race track.
“Really proud of the DEX Imaging Chevy and the guys. The car was phenomenal and to do that on one lap used tires. It was our fastest lap of the qualifying session, I think, and yeah, it was one of those good laps.”
Romain Grosjean also put down his fastest lap in the final few minutes of the session to clock in second fastest, followed by rookie Christian Lundgaard in third, as he continued the speed he has shown all weekend.
With the end result being his best qualifying effort yet, Lundgaard had to overcome some obstacles in the second round of qualifying to get there. He was handed a drive-through penalty for causing a local yellow, erasing his fastest lap of the session, but he quickly put the penalty behind him as he posted a quick enough time to transfer onto the Fast Six with ease.
“The weekend started off well,” Lundgaard said. “We were fastest in practice yesterday. I think we were missing a bit of pace earlier today in practice. I think the rain actually helped us, just cooled everything down. It seemed like everyone was struggling with brake stability and so were we. It definitely stabilized now. Now it’s locking the fronts and not the rears. We saw that out there.
“It was a very exciting session and we’re making progress. That’s the most important.”
Defending series champion Alex Palou will start Sunday’s race from fourth-place, followed by Pato O’Ward in fifth and Josef Newgarden rounding out the top three rows of the starting grid.
Rookie David Malukas will start seventh, with Will Power in eighth, Graham Rahal in ninth, and Rinus…
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