Pagenaud Paces Final Practice

Frenchman Simon Pagenaud paced final practice for the Izod IndyCar series at Baltimore, setting a time of 1:18.4391 seconds. He was a tenth faster than fellow Honda driver Scott Dixon. Will Power was third fastest. Dixon and Power had a incident during the final practice. Power got into the back of Dixon in turn twelve, resulting in a spin for Dixon and a red flag. Each driver had minor damage but continued. Sébastien Bourdais was fourth ahead of the Rahal Letterman Lanigan drivers of James Jakes and Graham Rahal in fifth and sixth.

Oriol Servià was seventh followed by the top Andretti Autosport driver, EJ Viso. Luca Filippi was ninth fastest with Justin Wilson rounding out the top ten. Championship points leader Helio Castroneves was eleventh only 0.0085 back of Wilson with Josef Newgarden just behind him. Dario Franchitti was thirteenth while Honda drivers Tristan Vautier and Franchitti's teammate Charlie Kimball rounded out the top fifteen.

Ryan Hunter-Reay was sixteenth fastest. He won last year at Baltimore from tenth on the grid. Sebastián Saavedra was seventeenth with Hunter-Reay's teammate James Hinchcliffe behind him in eighteenth. Chevrolet drivers and former teammates Tony Kanaan and Marco Andretti rounded out the top twenty.

Takuma Sato was twenty-first with Simona de Silvestro twenty-second. She brought out a red flag for getting in the tires in turn eight. Ed Carpenter was twenty-third with debutant Stefan Wilson twenty-fourth. The top seventeen were covered by less than a second with the top nineteen covered by less than a second and a half. 2.7379 seconds covered the whole field. All drivers were within 105% of the fastest time.

James Jakes will receive a ten spot grid penalty this weekend. He exceeded the five engine limit this morning in practice and his result will no longer count toward the Manufacture's Championship, a new rule for 2013.

Should these practice times carry over to the first round of qualifying, the twelve drivers advancing to round two would look like this:

Group One: Dixon, Power, Jakes, Rahal, Servià, Franchitti. Not advancing: Hunter-Reay, Saavedra, Hinchcliffe, Sato, de Silvestro, S. Wilson.
Gorup Two: Pagenaud, Bourdais, Viso, Filippi, J. Wilson, Castroneves. Not advancing: Newgarden, Vautier, Kimball, Kanaan, Andretti, Carpenter.

IndyCar qualifying will take place at noon ET and will air at 6:00 p.m. ET on NBCSN.