Will Power might have looked fairly comfortably in charge of qualifying for the Sao Paulo Indy 300, but he was never allowed to run away with it and didn't have the sort of crushing dominant pace that we've seen him unleash in the past.
Instead, the Penske driver's final lap of 1:21.4045s - despite being a new record for the event - was only half of a tenth of a second faster than Dario Franchitti's best time.
"It was satisfying," summed up the championship leader. "Being on pole is a good start to the weekend." The pole position is Power's 26th in his IZOD
IndyCar Series career, the same number as Dario Franchitti.
But Power's not taking anything for granted, and reckoned that they could all be in for a wild ride come Sunday. "I have a feeling it's going to be wet, or maybe wet-dry for the race," he said, which was pretty much the picture being painted by all the 24 hour forecasts. "It will mix things up a lot."
"I feel a lot more happy than I have in the last few races," said Franchitti, agreeing that it was his best qualifying performance so far this season, but the Scot was nonetheless disappointed not to come out one better in the final standings.
"I'm a little disappointed in myself but at the same time I feel a lot more happy than I have in the last few races," he said. "The time is in the car. On the first lap, Justin was in the runoff in the hairpin so I took it a bit easy there. And then the next lap I just messed it up to be honest, and I actually made up all of the time back again."
Dario's Ganassi team mate Scott Dixon recovering from an early overrun in the final round of qualifying to still manage to get to within almost four tenths of a second of them by the chequered flag.
"We had a pretty good car. It was fairly loose, which is a bit odd actually for this year," he said. "Thought we could go for the top spot in Q3. Went out and went straight through the run-off in turn 1 and couldn't slow the car down; the brakes were a bit strange.
"Then went down into turn 11 and the left-front locked straight away with a big flat spot and went into the run-off," he continued. "I had to get turned around and then take a lap to get going. We got back to third - I was lucky."