It took five days but Honda finally showed some muscle with three-time Indianapolis 500 winner Dario Franchitti being the fastest on Wednesday at 224.236 MPH. One-off driver Townsend Bell was second (223.716 MPH) ahead of Helio Castroneves (223.699 MPH), Ryan Hunter-Reay (223.093 MPH) and Ryan Briscoe (222.803 MPH). The Andretti Autosport entries of Marco Andretti (222.741 MPH) and EJ Viso (222.727 MPH) were sixth and seventh ahead of Alex Tagliani (222.350 MPH) and Scott Dixon (222.312 MPH). Rookie Carlos Muñoz (222.268 MPH) rounded out the top ten. Fastest from Tuesday, James Hinchcliffe was fourteenth (221.670 MPH).
Ed Carpenter was eleventh (221.879 MPH), ahead of points leader Takuma Sato in twelfth (221.805 MPH) and Simon Pagenaud in thirteenth (221.677 MPH). Rahal-Letterman-Lanigan Racing saw one car move from the bottom with James Jakes jumping up to sixteenth (221.241 MPH) but his teammates Graham Rahal and Michel Jourdain, Jr. were still down in thirtieth (219.123 MPH) and thirty-second (218.037 MPH) respectively.
Dragon Racing drivers Sébastien Bourdais was twentieth (220.949 MPH) quickest and Sebastián Saavedra was twenty-fifth (220.343 MPH). KV Racing Technology teammates Tony Kanaan and Simona de Silvestro were twenty-second (220.721 MPH) and twenty-eighth (219.859 MPH).
Other notables: Oriol Serviá seventeenth (221.153 MPH), Will Power twenty-third (220.719 MPH), Conor Daly twenty-fourth (220.659 MPH) and Justin Wilson twenty-seventh (220.174 MPH).
The big news from Wednesday was the announcement Buddy Rice would not be competing in the third Schmidt-Hamilton Motorsports. Names that have been thrown around as potential drivers for the #99 Schmidt Honda are Jay Howard, Katherine Legge, Bryan Clauson, Richie Hearn, Jaques Lazier and Davey Hamilton.
Forecast for Thursday calls for a high of 80 degrees Fahrenheit with a sixty percent chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 MPH.
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