NEWTON, IA – Team Penske are clearly the odds on favorites this weekend. In practice No. 1, they went 1-2-3. In qualifying, they followed that up with being 1-2-3 again. In final practice, it was 1-2.

It doesn’t get much better than that.

In final practice, Simon Pagenaud topped the speed charts in his No. 22 Chevrolet with a lap around the .894-mile Iowa Speedway oval at 174.462 mph. Pagenaud, also was second quickest in session No. 1 (178.533 mph) while also winning the pole for Saturday’s Iowa 300 (7 p.m. ET/NBCSN/INDYCAR Radio Network).

He’s the obvious pick to win on Saturday evening as he’s 2-for-2 in pole/race wins combo in 2019. But, the pole winner is also 0-for-11 in the Indy Car race at Iowa, so maybe he won’t be the winner after all.

If he’s not, look no further than his teammate Josef Newgarden. The current Indy Car points leader was P2 in final practice (173.775 mph) and quickest in the initial session (179.838 mph). He starts third in his No. 2 Chevrolet on Saturday.

Ed Carpenter (172.636 mph) was third in his No. 20 Chevrolet in final practice while Scott Dixon (171.560 mph) and Conor Daly (170.316 mph) rounded out the top five in the final one-hour session.

Final practice was hot with temperatures still near the 90 degree mark with the head index of 111. That created some wild action in practice as we saw a bunch of group running in the only real practice session in race conditions this weekend.

Both sessions went incident free with Will Power (178.400 mph), Alexander Rossi (177.595 mph) and Dixon (177.445 mph) rounding out the top five in session No. 1.