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Qualifying Report: ABC Supply 500

LONG POND, Pa. August 20, 2016—Takuma Sato and Jack Hawksworth both posted their career best qualifying runs on superspeedways while qualifying for the ABC Supply 500 at Pocono Raceway today.

Driving the No. 14 ABC Supply Honda, Sato qualified third (beating his personal best of fourth at this track two years ago) with a two-lap average speed of 220.067mph. Hawksworth will start 12th in the No. 41 ABC Supply Honda with an average speed of 218.051mph.

“Very, very happy about our qualifying run,” Sato said afterwards. “We had a very good baseline car. We tested here a couple weeks ago which helped massively and we gained a good understanding for the strong superspeedway package that Honda worked so hard on and it looks like we have a pretty strong car. It’s a lot of compliments to our engineering staff particularly my race engineer Raul who worked on so many details and the car was almost perfect and I really enjoyed running those two laps. It’s a fantastic achievement. Hopefully we’ll have a strong car for the race and have a good day tomorrow.”

Hawksworth, who missed his first race at this track in 2014 due to a practice accident wherein he sustained a bruised heart, was pleased with his run which at the time was fifth quickest through the first 12 qualifiers.

“Pretty good qualifying considering we didn’t get much running here at the test,” the 25-year-old Brit said. “I think we did a good job this morning to get the car where we needed it to be. We did a qualifying sim and the car felt pretty good. We stayed the same for qualifying, not anticipating what the track was going to do but knowing if we kept the starting platform we should be okay and we did. It worked out okay since we qualified in the top half. Now we just have to do the work tonight to get the car dialed in for traffic and drive a strong race tomorrow.”

Mikhail Aleshin won his first Verizon P-1 Award with his two-lap average speed of 220.445mph. He became the first Russian to do. Josef Newgarden was second, followed by Sato, Helio Castroneves and Carlos Munoz. Ryan Hunter-Reay, Charlie Kimball and Juan Pablo Montoya crashed in practice this morning but all drivers escaped injury. Hunter-Reay was the only driver to not attempt a qualification run in a backup car. The defending race winner will start last tomorrow.

The ABC Supply 500 will be broadcast live on the NBC Sports Network tomorrow starting at 3:00 p.m. ET.