Qualifying thoughts

 The TV is on and they're qualifying at Indianapolis on this summer-struck Sunday, and suddenly it is 1995 again. Suddenly I'm standing behind a certain pit at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, shielding my eyes against the glare of the late-afternoon sun as a I watch a crew member unused to scrambling scramble is if his next breath was riding on it.

"How's it looking?" I ask, when he finally pauses for a second.

A wordless shrug.

I don't know if there were any similar sentiments in Will Power's pit Sunday. But I'm guessing the anxiety level would have seemed familiar.

Nineteen ninety-five, see, was the year of the Great Penske Fail, and that particular day the crewman and his mates were making an ultimately futile effort to get Roger Penske's team into the 500 -- in a borrowed Reynard, no less. The entries Penske brought with him, usually meticulously prepared Saturn V rockets, inexplicably turned out to be meticulously prepared meat wagons. They were slower than erosion, and no one could figure out why.

And 26 years later?

Twenty-six years later, Power sat in his car watching the minutes crawl by on their hands and knees, sweating out qualifying runs by Simona de Silvestro, RC Enerson and Charlie Kimball. If two of the three put up faster numbers than his 228.876, he'd be bumped from the 500 with no time to go back out and re-qualify. 

Bumped. Will Power. Penske stalwart, 2018 500 winner, four-time front-row qualifier.

Last-row starter this year, after Kimball and Enerson both failed to get in.

Every driver almost every year says the same thing: Indy qualifying is the most nerve-shredding thing they do in a sport designed to make confetti out of nerves. It is never easy, even if it looks as if the guys who drive for Penske or Chip Ganassi or Andretti Autosport or Ed Carpenter Racing -- a team that always qualifies well for the 500 -- simply dial up a number and then go hit it. 

That's not how it works, they'll tell you. Sometimes they miss -- and sometimes they really miss.

See: Roger Penske, 1995. Penske in general, and Will Power in particular, 2021.

Power will start 32nd, middle of the last row. No Penske driver will answer the green higher than 17th, which will be Scott McLaughlin's launch point on race day. So, yeah, they missed this time.

Everyone else?

Well, Scott Dixon, IndyCar's Jedi Master, won the pole by less than the blink of an eye over 21-year-old Colton Herta. Twenty-year-old Rinus VeeKay starts on the outside of Row 1 and Ed Carpenter inside Row 2 for Ed Carpenter Racing. All four of Chip Ganassi's drivers qualified in the top nine. 

Among them: Twenty-one-year-old Alex Palou, and 46-year-old Tony Kanaan. 

One (Palou) just won his first IndyCar race a month ago. The other (Kanaan) has started 386 IndyCar and Champ Car races and won 17 times, including the 2013 500.

So, fast kids and old hands, both up front. Neon names -- Power, Josef Newgarden, Simon Pagenaud -- deep in the field. A dozen more potential winners scattered between.

All of them, presumably, eagerly await the drop of the green.

But not as eagerly as they greeted Sunday's end.