BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (May 3, 2025) — Good news, bad news? The good news is that drivers Santino Ferrucci and David Malukas have fast race cars for tomorrow’s Children’s of Alabama Indy Grand Prix at Barber Motorsports Park. The bad news is that traffic hindered their qualifying sessions.
Ferrucci barely missed advancing out of Round One, Group One, finishing seventh in his group. He will start a lucky 13th in the No. 14 Sexton Properties Chevrolet.
Ferrucci chats with Larry Foyt before qualifying.
“It was an okay session,” said Ferrucci. “I think our car was pretty good, definitely fast enough to advance. It was really tough to get a gap. Also, the way that everything worked out, we were too heavy on fuel, which is honestly all the lap time that we really needed to advance as well. Or just having a clean out lap before we started our push lap to understand the balance correctly. You’re missing it by five hundreds of a second so it’s the blink of an eye. But these days it’s so tight. We sit good for tomorrow in 13th with three sets of sticker reds and we’ll come through the field.”
Malukas was unhappy with his car yesterday but the engineering staff and crew made some adjustments and the 23-year-old topped this morning’s practice session for the third time in his career. Expectations were high for qualifying.
Race engineer James Schnabel and David Malukas discuss setup changes.
Unfortunately, he didn’t get a clear lap in the final minutes of qualifying when everyone put on the “sticker reds,” aka fresh alternate compound Firestone tires. Held up by traffic, Malukas finished 10th in his group and will start 20th in the No. 4 AJ Foyt Racing Chevrolet.
“We finished up qualifying obviously a lot shorter than what we were expecting,” Malukas said. “Looking at these times, the car was fast enough for it, we had the pace, just unfortunate, unfortunate. Just keep getting very unlucky in all these situations. And in this qualifying session, we just got jam-packed with the timing. Everybody jumped us in pit lane and we didn’t get a clear lap. So, this one I think frustrates everybody the most, and it hurts because we knew we had an incredible car and we didn’t even make it out of group one just because of track position. It’s the way the game is. It sucks but we’ll calm down, put our heads down and come up with a good strategy for the race. We know we have a fast car so we’ll be trying to bring it forward tomorrow.”
NTT INDYCAR Series champion and current points leader Alex Palou earned the NTT P1 Award outpacing Scott McLaughlin in the final seconds of qualifying. Rounding out the Firestone Fast Six were Colton Herta, Will Power, Rinus Veekay and Nolan Siegel.
The 90-lap race on the pristine 17-turn, 2.3-mile road course will be broadcast live tomorrow on FOX starting at 1:30 p.m. ET.