Practice Report: Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach

LONG BEACH, Calif. April 15—The ABC Supply Hondas of Jack Hawksworth and Takuma Sato rolled off the truck to post the third and fifth quickest times in the opening practice for the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach.

In practice 1, Hawksworth clocked a lap of 1 minute, 8.48 seconds while Sato wasn’t far behind with a time of 1 minute, 8.70 seconds. Juan Pablo Montoya was quickest with a lap of 1 minute, 8.12 seconds.

In practice 2, Hawksworth and Sato were a further bit down the chart as they explored some different settings on their ABC Supply Hondas. Hawksworth was ninth quick with his lap time of 1 minute, 8.11 seconds and Sato posted a time of 1 minute, 8.18 seconds.

“In the first session we didn’t really get to try anything because there were a lot of red flags and we had a small issue with brakes at the beginning,” Hawksworth said. “In the second session, we did get through the things we needed to and learned a couple things which were positives. I’m really happy with the car, it feels really connected around here and I feel I understand what it’s doing. The pace is very good. We’re not as fast as we were in the first practice but the pace in the first practice isn’t a fair reflection. I think tomorrow we’ll be at the front and we’ll be in good shape.”

“The session went well,” Sato said. “We had a couple of experimental test items that we wanted to try and we collected very valuable data. Of course it’s very nice to be back in Long Beach—typical California where the fans are very enthusiastic and we have a lot of fans flying in from Japan so that’s great. Now that we have the data, tomorrow we will be stronger.”

Will Power posted the quickest lap time of the day with a 1 minute, 7.59 second lap. There will be one more practice session in the morning before tomorrow afternoon’s qualifying session.