Markham’s debut as an IndyCar venue nearly unraveled before a wheel turned in anger. By Saturday evening, Louis Foster had a pole trophy and the weekend’s most compressed schedule on record.
Foster put his No. 45 Rahal Letterman Lanigan Honda on pole for Sunday’s Ontario Honda Dealers Indy at Markham with a lap of 1:13.2383, good for 103.225 mph around the brand-new street circuit. It is his second career pole and his first of the 2026 NTT INDYCAR SERIES season, his previous coming at Road America last year. He earned it on a day when drivers had to sprint through two practice sessions and full knockout qualifying without the luxury of Friday running, which organizers canceled after the Markham course was not completed and had not cleared safety inspections in time.
Will Power provided the afternoon’s most alarming moment in the second practice session, striking the Turn 10 wall at speeds approaching 150 mph. Power qualified 24th. The championship leader, Alex Palou, contributed his own drama in the final round of qualifying: Palou set the fastest lap of that segment at 1:13.8 before immediately slapping the wall and spinning into the runoff area with damage to the right-front and left-rear. He qualifies 12th. His 110-point margin over his nearest title competitor survives the afternoon, but a Palou who starts from mid-pack on a street circuit is a different race-day equation than one who starts from the front row.
Foster, who had the pace to make that margin uncomfortable anyway, was clear-eyed about the sequence. “Alex crashing made things a little easier for us today,” he said, “but honestly, we had such a good car and a strong margin that we would’ve fought him for pole position anyway.” That is a reasonable reading: Honda-powered machinery filled the entire top 12 in qualifying, a reflection of a power advantage that tends to manifest on high-speed street circuits with long straights. Markham’s back straight is exactly that kind of test.
Marcus Ericsson qualified fourth for Andretti Global, his second consecutive fourth-place qualifying effort. Rookie Dennis Hauger was fifth for Dale Coyne Racing, building on what Hauger called his best qualifying result since St. Petersburg. Hauger currently holds a 27-point lead in the Rookie of the Year standings over his nearest rival, 174 to 147. Mick Schumacher, the third RLL entry, reached the Top 12 round of qualifying for the first time this season and slotted 11th, a result that will give the team something to work with in race-strategy terms. Scott Dixon qualified ninth, Graham Rahal 10th.
The compressed schedule created a logistical problem with no clean solution: teams arrived at a brand-new circuit they had never driven, ran two practice sessions back-to-back, and then went immediately into knockout qualifying with no overnight to digest data. Setup changes that would normally be spread across two days had to be read, made, and validated in hours. That Foster and Ericsson emerged from that process in the top four suggests both teams had a baseline confidence in their setups coming in.
Sunday’s race airs at 12 PM ET on Fox, with flag-to-flag coverage on the INDYCAR Radio Network and SiriusXM INDYCAR Nation, Channel 160.
Palou has enough of a points cushion to weather a difficult afternoon. Foster, starting from pole on a street circuit that already suits his car, is in position to make that cushion feel a little smaller by Sunday evening.
Source: Honda. Images courtesy of Honda.
