INDIANAPOLIS — Ed Carpenter crashed Team Penske’s front-row party Sunday.

The owner-driver hopes it leads to an even bigger celebration next week at his home track.

Ed Carpenter gets a hug from teammate Danica Patrick on Sunday after Carpenter won the pole for next weekend's Indianapolis 500. It was Carpenter's third Indy 500 pole. Patrick, meanwhile, qualified seventh. Associated Press/Darron Cummings

Carpenter blew past three Penske drivers on the second-to-last run in qualifying, claiming his third Indianapolis 500 pole with a four-lap average of 229.618 mph. Simon Pagenaud was second at 228.761. Now he’s looking for the one thing that has eluded him: A trip to victory lane at the track run by his stepfather’s family.

“How about Ed? That’s awesome. He deserves it,” Danica Patrick said after watching her teammate’s run.

Carpenter might not have been the biggest name or the best story around Indianapolis Motor Speedway this weekend.

Patrick qualified seventh for her first IndyCar start since 2011 and will start on the inside of Row 3 for the last start of her career with a 228.090. Three-time Indianapolis 500 winner Helio Castroneves will chase a record-tying victory from the middle of Row 3 after going 227.859 on the final run of the day.

And it looked for a while like Roger Penske’s powerhouse team would sweep the front row with Simon Pagenaud, Will Power and Josef Newgarden – all series champions – in the top three spots.

Carpenter was the only driver to top 230 on a lap and the only one to top 229 on all four.

“Second place is first loser, I guess,” Pagenaud joked after holding the top starting spot for just a few minutes.

Qualifying went pretty much according to script until Castroneves came up well short of winning his fifth career Indy pole.

Now the focus turns to race day, the grand finale of Patrick’s farewell double, Castroneves’ continual quest for win No. 4 on Indianapolis’ historic 2.5-mile oval and whether Carpenter can kick off a family celebration with a swig of milk.

“When I was sitting in the car and I heard the 230, I asked the guys, ‘do we have enough gear to do that?’ ” Castroneves said. “They said ‘Well, with a little help from the wind we could.’ ”

JAMES HINCHCLIFFE watched the final day of Indianapolis 500 qualifying in street clothes, refusing to lobby for someone to give him their ride.

Hinchcliffe was bumped from the field of 33 in the first round of qualifying and spent Sunday as a spectator. Schmidt Peterson Motorsports, one of IndyCar’s anchor teams, wants the popular Canadian driver in the race, but Hinchcliffe acknowledged it is unlikely he will be.

“At this point I believe I won’t,” he said. “I know there’s precedent for doing that, but at the end of the day every single driver in this race earned their way in and it’s hard to knock someone out of that.”

The clearest path to make it in would be replacing teammate Jay Howard.

Hinchcliffe is fifth in the season standings, and missing the Indy 500 will get him zero points in a race that scores double in the championship hunt. His primary sponsor, Arrow Electronics, has its name on a massive temporary suite complex in the speedway’s first turn, and he’s the centerpiece of Honda’s national campaign.

Not having Hinchcliffe, a crossover star because of his runner-up appearance on “Dancing with the Stars,” in the field is a disaster for all parties involved in his program.

And there was no immediate indication a solution was in the works. Rules prevent teams from making driver changes until qualifying ends, so the earliest Schmidt could replace Howard with Hinchcliffe is Monday. But Howard has been firm that he won’t give up the ride he raised money to race, and qualified in the field.

Another possibility to get the two drivers bumped from the field – Hinchcliffe and Pippa Mann – on the starting grid vanished when Jay Frye, IndyCar’s president of competition and operations, said the field would not be expanded.

It was common practice for decades for more than 33 drivers to show up at Indy and there have been scores of times a top driver failed to make the biggest race in America.

But “bumping” had faded in a down economy, and 35 drivers showed up at Indy this year for the first time in three seasons. It meant two would not make the race, but no one thought it would be Hinchcliffe or Mann, who is seeking to make her sixth Indy 500 and join Danica Patrick as the only women in the field.

There’s another avenue, too – cutting a deal for a qualified car. That’s what Andretti Autosport did in 2011 to get Ryan Hunter-Reay back in the race after he failed to qualify.

That possibility has thrust others, such as Conor Daly, into the mix. He struggled to make the cut Saturday and qualified 33rd with the slowest average Sunday. But he’s worked all year to put together his Indy program and isn’t interested in giving up his seat.

“I’m not getting out unless they give me millions of dollars,” Daly said.

OXFORD PLAINS: Eddie MacDonald of Rowley, Massachusetts, held off Jimmy Hebert of Williamsville, Vermont, in the closing laps to win the American Canadian Tour’s 150-lap Late Model race at Oxford Plains Speedway, and Curtis Gerry of Waterboro earned his fourth straight Pro All-Stars Series Super Late Model victory at OPS with a win in the Honey Badger Bar & Grill 150.

Gerry, last year’s Oxford 250 champion, is 3 of 3 in PASS races this season, with two wins at OPS and one at Beech Ridge Motor Speedway.

Travis Benjamin, the PASS North points leader and reigning series champion from Morrill, finished second behind Gerry.

SATURDAY NIGHT’S RACE

NASCAR CUP SERIES: Nothing can stop Kevin Harvick these days – not an experimental rules package or a field of racers with nothing but pride on the line.

And the hottest driver in NASCAR scored a $1 million payday by winning the All-Star race at Charlotte Motor Speedway on Saturday night.

Harvick’s win came exactly 11 years after his only other win in the exhibition event. This time the victory was part of a raging hot streak that brought him into the race with five points race victories, including the last two.

It’s technically three in a row now, although the All-Star race is for cash only. But the stat sheet shows that Harvick has won six of the 13 races since the season-opening Daytona 500, and Ford drivers have eight of those wins.

NASCAR made a radical change to spice up what had become a boring event. The aerodynamic package included a controversial horsepower-sapping restrictor plate that slowed the cars into a tighter pack that allowed for increased passing.

The package Saturday night did make for better racing, but the same result: Harvick celebrating again.

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