Qualifying Report: Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio

LEXINGTON, Ohio July 30, 2016—Jack Hawksworth and Takuma Sato have their work cut out for them tomorrow in the Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio.

Starting 17th and 20th respectively at a track where it is difficult to pass means that the ABC Supply teams will have to employ an alternate fuel strategy: get out of sync with the leaders on pitting and therefore be in position to take advantage of timely yellows to gain track position. Sato was able to do just that at the last race in Toronto where he started 20th and finished fifth.

Despite testing here earlier in the month, the team struggled to find speed at the picturesque 2.258-mile road course, situated midway between Columbus and Cleveland. Neither driver transferred out of the first round of qualifying.

Hawksworth posted a lap time of 1 minute, 5.0196 seconds (125.021mph) which lands him inside of row nine. Sato’s lap time was quicker at 1 minute, 4.8354 seconds, but relative to group 2, he was tenth quickest and so will start outside row 10.

“Not a great session,” Hawksworth said. “The track got greasier in the afternoon and we just didn’t have the grip. The track was getting better and better as the session went on and I think we could have gone a little bit quicker if we could have had another lap at the end but we only planned for six laps, normally that should have been enough. The track changed a lot, it changed an absolute ton for what we did for the car. We were expecting the red tire was going to give it a lot more grip than it did. The track was really greasy so what we did was the opposite for where the track went basically.”

Sato had no complaints about the car’s handling and found it perplexing that the results weren’t quicker.

“I don’t know what to say,” Sato said. “Everything was as planned. Looking at the lap times, the best lap should be on the 3rd lap or 4th lap-ish, especially for the beginning of the session, the track evolution was quite big. We planned to go to two sets of the reds, which we haven’t done this for a long time but we thought we needed to after practice. There was no major issue, we simply didn’t have the speed to transfer. The balance was good, the car felt good but the speed wasn’t there. There were no mistakes, no moments and it was a hard, solid lap and we still couldn’t make it. I don’t know what we’re going to do but we will figure something out.”

Simon Pagenaud won the pole with a time of 1 minute, 3.87 seconds (127.271mph). Second through sixth were: Will Power, Josef Newgarden, Ryan Hunter-Reay, Charlie Kimball and Graham Rahal.

The team will have a final 30 minute warm-up tomorrow morning. The race will be televised on CNBC Sunday afternoon starting at 2 p.m. ET.