Pagenaud: “Suddenly everything is rolling easily”

After qualifying, he told the assembled media: “The biggest thing for me is to make myself comfortable with the car, whatever the setup is, and once I am comfortable, I can really push it and do some things like today.

“So that's where we're at right now, and it feels really nice. I don't want to jinx it, so we're just going to keep doing what we're doing and not get too excited.”

Pagenaud, who suffered a bad year results-wise – if not performance wise – in 2015, his first season with Team Penske, suggested his pole lap was a result of experience and forethought.

“Yesterday, we worked on the racecar. Today we worked on the qualifying car. We made a few good changes and the car was really nice this morning for how I imagined [it would be on] the red tires. We kept good notes from last year, and we knew we had to be competitive on that one lap.

“So what we did is we planned on making sure we could bank a really strong lap on one lap, the first segment, which was enough to go through. Second segment, same thing, and then we had fresh enough tires for the Fast Six.

“Then it was about putting the least amount of fuel in the car and go for the special lap, and glad it worked out… I felt good enough with the car to put it all together.”  

Happy to beat Power, confident for the race

Pagenaud admitted that beating Power to pole gave him extra satisfaction. He said: “It's just nice to be the fastest today. In qualifying it's important to be in the lead for sure, especially here, because it's so hard to pass and it's such an aerodynamic racetrack.

“It’s definitely a game I enjoy; qualifying is fun, and Will is definitely the best in the business, so when you can beat him, it feels nice for sure.”

He went on: “Honestly, I'm just having a lot of fun, but of course I'm working really hard. I'm still working as hard as I worked before, but suddenly everything is rolling really well and really easily. The whole team is fantastic, and we don't have to really think about it too much to make it work.”

Regarding the race ahead, Pagenaud commented: “I think we're actually in really good shape. I think it will be four tires going off together.

“You've got to take care of the rear, but our car has been really consistent all weekend. We'll see in the morning after the warmup.”