Pato O’Ward will start the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach from eighth place on Sunday, but he feels that he should at least be a couple rows higher on the grid if others had been penalized appropriately.
During the second round of qualifying, Will Power touched the wall and was not able to make it completely off the track, causing a local yellow to be displayed for the remainder of the session.
O’Ward backed off and aborted his fast lap, but multiple other drivers improved on their own best time while the yellow flag was being displayed.
Those improvements bumped the title contender out of the top six positions, and relegated him to a grid spot on the fourth row.
Despite taking over 10 minutes to review the situation, IndyCar race control chose to only penalize one driver, and not the ones that would have benefitted O’Ward.
“We should be in there,” O’Ward told NBC as he watched cars head out for the final qualifying session. “We were up on our last lap.
“I had eyes, and I saw yellow flags, and they were there until the end of the session. Palou had to slow in front of me. I slowed up because that’s what you have to do whenever there’s yellow flags.
“IndyCar is never consistent with their calls. They need to review that because we should be in the Fast Six right now.
“I don’t know if we quite had it for pole, but we definitely had it to get into the Fast Six. Crappy situation.”
One of the drivers that was not penalized was O’Ward’s Arrow McLaren SP team-mate Felix Rosenqvist.
The team had the data to show that Rosenqvist improved his time and should have been penalized, and it would have been the team’s chosen outcome since any assistance to the driver that is still in the points fight is preferred.
“Kind of sucks to get hosed by a very odd call,” O’Ward elaborated a few minutes later in the media session.
“We’re in the same team and we have literal data that shows that at least two of the cars that didn’t get penalized kept going quickly in the yellow flag.
“I don’t know. Maybe rules don’t apply the last race of the season when everything’s at stake. It just sucks. Sucks that we’re stuck there because we should have transferred. We had the car to fight it.
“I’m still waiting on the explanation, just like you and everybody else. But doubt I’ll get an explanation.”
