» IndyCars: Tagliani bags Texas pole

Alex Tagliani is a driver who has fond memories of Texas Motor Speedway. The Canadian has claimed back-to-back pole positions at the circuit, going quickest in Friday night’s qualifying session at the 1.5-mile oval, narrowly edging out Dario Franchitti for top spot.

The Canadian posted a two-lap average speed of 215.691mph in the session – the first this season to be run under the traditional oval racing format, where drivers head out in a pre-set order to challenge for pole position.

The Andretti Autosport pairing of Marco Andretti, and then James Hinchcliffe, held top honours after their early runs, before ‘Hinch’ was displaced by Indianapolis 500 winner Franchitti.

The Scot was challenged by series leader Will Power for top spot, but the Australian faltered on his second lap when he hit the rev limiter. Power was then displaced by Franchitti’s Chip Ganassi team-mates Graham Rahal and Scott Dixon, giving the team a provisional 1-2-3 in qualifying.

But then Tagliani took to the top spot in his Bryan Herta-run entry, in only the team’s third outing since it switched to Honda power after struggling with the uncompetitive Lotus engine it had run earlier in the year. His pole position average speed was just over 0.5mph quicker than the result he’d achieved a year before when he took pole position for the Sam Schmidt Motorsport team, an impressive result for the series’ new Dallara DW12 chassis and the latest engine configuration adopted by the series.

While IndyCar rookie Josef Newgarden starts from the rear of the field after failing to set a qualifying time (his engine was being changed after a failure in the day’s earlier practice session), two other drivers failed to post a qualifying result within the traditional 105% cut-off.

JR Hildebrand finished as the slowest timed runner in his Panther Racing entry, brought about by a mistake by the American on his single warm-up lap, which compromised the rest of his two-lap dash.

Simona de Silvestro also failed to make the qualifying cut in the field’s only Lotus-powered entry, with the HVM driver clearly struggling with the gutless engine on an oval where horsepower is everything.

It is widely expected that series officials will again force her to retire from Saturday night’s race if she is unable to sustain a quick enough race pace in tomorrow’s 228-lap event, as was the case at the Indianapolis 500 a fortnight ago.

2012 IndyCar Series Texas Firestone 550 Final Qualifying Results:

	Driver	Entrant	Result
1.	Alex Tagliani	Bryan Herta Autosports	215.691mph
2.	Dario Franchitti	Chip Ganassi Racing	215.646mph
3.	Graham Rahal	Chip Ganassi Racing	215.554mph
4.	Scott Dixon	Chip Ganassi Racing	215.331mph
5.	Will Power	Team Penske	215.116mph
16.	James Hinchcliffe	Andretti Autosport	214.920mph
7.	Tony Kanaan	KV Racing Technology	214.701mph
8.	Mike Conway	AJ Foyt Enterprises	214.458mph
9.	Marco Andretti	Andretti Autosport	214.424mph
10.	Takuma Sato	Rahal Letterman Lanigan	214.196mph
11.	Simon Pagenaud	Schmidt Hamilton	214.082mph
12.	Ryan Briscoe	Team Penske	214.060mph
13.	Oriol Servià	Panther / Dreyer & Reinbold	213.957mph
14.	Rubens Barrichello	KV Racing Technology	213.949mph
15.	Ryan Hunter-Reay	Andretti Autosport	213.927mph
16.	EJ Viso	KV Racing Technology	213.444mph
17.	Hélio Castroneves	Team Penske	213.402mph
18.	Charlie Kimball	Chip Ganassi Racing	212.833mph
19.	Justin Wilson	Dale Coyne Racing	212.136mph
20.	Ed Carpenter	Ed Carpenter Racing	211.643mph
21.	James Jakes	Dale Coyne Racing	211.245mph
22.	Katherine Legge	Dragon Racing	210.543mph
23.	Simona de Silvestro	Lotus-HVM Racing	204.066mph
24.	JR Hildebrand	Panther Racing	202.596mph
25.	Josef Newgarden	Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing	no time