California’s Colton Herta breaks the Long Beach track record in Saturday qualifying to claim the pole for Sunday’s race.
LONG BEACH, Calif. — Colton Herta broke the Long Beach track record in Saturday qualifying, and the California native will start from the pole for his home IndyCar race. Herta turned a lap at 1 minute,05.3095 seconds on the temporary street course set up through downtown Long Beach to earn his eighth career pole and the right to lead the field to green on Sunday. The previous track record was 1:06.2254 set by Helio Castroneves in 2017. Herta, who is from nearby Valencia, is the defending race winner and hoping to give Andretti Autosport its fourth consecutive victory in the most prestigious street course race in the United States. «As a young kid, I always trained to be an IndyCar driver and that’s because of this race,» Herta said. Herta paced a fast session for Andretti, which saw him,2018 and 2019 winner Alexander Rossi and Romain Grosjean advance into the final qualifying round.
