Scott Dixon rolls off from pole position for the Grand Prix of Baltimore as the Kiwi looks to make up ground on the championship points leader Helio Castroneves. Dixon won the Sunday race at Toronto from pole position this year and has won the last five races he has started on pole dating back to Motegi 2009. Should Dixon hold on for the win and score maximum points and Castroneves finish where he is starting in seventh, Dixon will trail the Brazilian by eleven points heading into the final three races of the season.
Will Power will start second after picking up his first victory of the season last week at Sonoma. Power won the inaugural Grand Prix of Baltimore two years ago. Simon Pagenaud will start third. He finished third at Baltimore last year. Justin Wilson starts fourth. Wilson has three podiums in 2013 but finished seventeenth last year at Baltimore. Josef Newgarden starts fifth in what will be his first career IndyCar start at Baltimore. Newgarden missed the race last year after suffering a broken finger at Sonoma and was substituted by Bruno Junqueira. Tristan Vautier will start sixth place. He has won each year at the Grand Prix of Baltimore. In 2011, he won in Star Mazda and last year he won the Indy Lights race.
Castroneves starts seventh, a career best for the Brazilian at Baltimore. Ryan Hunter-Reay starts eighth. He won from tenth on the grid last year at Baltimore. Charlie Kimball starts ninth. Kimball has finished twenty-first and eighteenth in his two Baltimore starts. Takuma Sato rounds out the top ten. Sato has only one top ten finish since Indianapolis, a seventh at Milwaukee and the Japanese driver has finished twentieth or worse in every race since Milwaukee. James Hinchcliffe starts eleventh as he looks for his fourth win in 2013 and Graham Rahal starts twelfth after bringing out a red flag at the end of the second round of qualifying. The Ohioan was set to make the Firestone Fast Six had he not caused the red flag.
Luca Filippi starts thirteenth for his second career start. Tony Kanaan will start fourteenth in what will be his 212th consecutive and record breaking start. The first race of this streak was Portland 2001. Kanaan completed only one lap. Oriol Servià starts fifteenth. The Spaniard has finished second and seventh in two starts at Baltimore. Marco Andretti starts sixteenth as he looks for his first career top ten at Baltimore and tries to keep his championship hopes alive. Simona de Silvestro will start seventeenth on her twenty-fifth birthday. Should she win, de Silvestro would become the tenth different driver to win on their birthday and first woman to do so. Ed Carpenter starts eighteenth.
Sebastián Saavedra starts nineteenth with EJ Viso starting twentieth. Stefan Wilson will debut in twenty-first. Two years ago, Wilson finished fifth in the Indy Lights race at Baltimore. Sébastien Bourdais will start twenty-second after clipping the tires in the chicane during qualifying. James Jakes and Dario Franchitti will start on the final row. Both also changed to their sixth engine of the season, making them ineligible to score points toward the Manufactures' championship.
NBCSN's live coverage of the Grand Prix of Baltimore begins at 2:00 p.m. ET with green flag at 2:40 p.m. ET.
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