Simon Pagenaud could resurrect his season at the IndyCar Grand Prix

Simon Pagenaud has notched two IndyCar Grand Prix victories since its inaugural race in 2014.

His first win came that opening year, on his way to a fifth-place finish in the Verizon IndyCar Series championship for Schmidt Peterson Motorsports. Two years later he repeated the feat, one of five victories in 2016 as he coasted to the championship for Team Penske. Fast forward another two years, and a win could propel him back into the conversation for the 2018 title.

He admitted Thursday before qualifying that he needs this one more than the previous two victories.

“It’s unfortunate we haven’t had a good start of the season,” Pagenaud said. “Performance is there, anyways, it’s just we’ve got to turn things around a little bit. I don’t want to go into details about what happened at every race, it’s just what it is. It’s racing.”

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The Team Penske No. 22 driver sits 15th in the standings ahead of Saturday’s race with 66 points. He’s four behind last year’s Indianapolis 500 winner, Takuma Sato, who’s racing with Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing this season, and 92 behind current Verizon IndyCar Series leader and Team Penske teammate Josef Newgarden.

Pagenaud has failed to finish better than ninth so far this season, but if there’s a track on the schedule made for him to break into the top five or even get on the podium, the road course at Indianapolis Motor Speedway could be it. He qualified seventh Friday, barely edged out of the Fast 6 by Newgarden, and continued his streak of never starting the race lower than seventh.

Aside from 2015, he’s never finished worse than fourth. Pagenaud is more familiar with the road course at Indianapolis Motor Speedway than his on-track experience there and two wins can show.

“It’s a lot of fun here,” Pagenaud said Thursday. “It’s very European-style racing, pretty flat track with very technical corner and medium-speed corners in Turn 4. It’s very similar to, actually, the track I grew up on in France, so I think that’s probably why I like this kind of technique — corners technique.”

How comfortable he feels helps with how rapidly the fifth race weekend of the season comes and goes.

“It’s obviously a pretty quick weekend, so two-day weekend,” Pagenaud continued. “We try to put all we can into qualifying, and then from there it’s usually a race where you want to qualify well.”

Sebastien Bourdais would have scheduled an afternoon practice session Thursday instead of having a 9 a.m. practice Friday. He predicted Thursday the colder morning temperature Friday would be somewhat useless in preparing for the race.

Pagenaud agreed. As did Team Penske teammate Will Power, who owns the other two victories at the IndyCar Grand Prix since 2014 and qualified for the pole position Friday.

As has happened all season long, the new aero kits mean teams can’t just plug in what they learned a season ago. It’s not clear whether that will take away the momentum Pagenaud and Power have had at the track. Power winning the pole and Pagenaud qualifying well indicate it won’t, but Power predicted Thursday that Saturday would be even more competitive than the year before.

“I can see it being — especially being such a hot day on race day — it being pretty good racing, tire degradation, and people might struggle to come on to the front straight here a little bit,” Power said. “So yeah, it’ll be absolutely better racing here than last year.”

The National Weather service is forecasting a high of 86 degrees on Saturday.

Pagenaud, who thought he had a chance at the pole, is confident in his chances. He understands how crazy the opening lap can be here.

“It’s possible,” Pagenaud said after qualifying. “If you don’t believe in it, don’t go racing. Right?”