Morning Warm-Up: Mid-Ohio 2014

Sébastien Bourdais looks for his 33rd career victory at Mid-Ohio

For the second time in 2014, Sébastien Bourdais will start from pole position. The Frenchman won from pole two weeks ago in race one from Toronto. Bourdais has won 56.25% of the races he has started from pole position. Bourdais is joined on row one by Josef Newgarden. The Tennessee-native will be making his 48th career start and is still looking for his first career IndyCar victory. He has two second place finish, the most recent coming at Iowa last month.

Tony Kanaan starts third. The Brazilian looks for his first career podium at Mid-Ohio. Kanaan has finished on the podium in the last three races. Carlos Muñoz will start a road/street course career-best fourth. Ryan Hunter-Reay starts fifth with Will Power on the outside of row three as both look to take advantage of championship leader Hélio Castroneves starting back in fifteenth. Both Hunter-Reay and Power have two podiums at Mid-Ohio but both have yet to win at the 2.25-mile track. 

Graham Rahal starts seventh at his home track. He has only one top ten finish in six Mid-Ohio starts with four finishes outside the top fifteen. Justin Wilson starts eighth. The furthest back a Mid-Ohio winner has come from is eighth position (Al Unser, Jr. in 1995 and Juan Pablo Montoya in 1999). Wilson's best career Mid-Ohio finish  occurred last year when he finished eighth. Simon Pagenaud starts ninth. The Frenchman went from eighth to second last year. Carlos Huertas will start tenth in his first career Mid-Ohio start. 

Juan Pablo Montoya starts eleventh in his first Mid-Ohio appearance since 2000. He won at Mid-Ohio in 1999. Mike Conway starts twelfth, a personal best at Mid-Ohio. The Brit's best Mid-Ohio finish is twentieth. Mikhail Aleshin starts thirteenth with Sebastián Saaveda starting fourteenth, a personal best at Mid-Ohio. Saavedra is guaranteed to improve on his average Mid-Ohio finish of 23.5 as only twenty-two cars are scheduled to start. 

Hélio Castroneves will start fifteenth. When the green flag falls, his points lead will vanish as Will Power starting in sixth position, will be on equal terms with his Penske teammate, each having 548 points. Hunter-Reay will cut his gap from 69 back to 56 back and Pagenaud will cut his gap from 71 back to 64 back when the race goes green. Marco Andretti will be on the outside of row eight. This is Andretti's second worst career start at Mid-Ohio as he looks for his six consecutive top ten finish at the track. James Hinchcliffe starts seventeenth, his worst career start at Mid-Ohio and Jack Hawksworth will start eighteenth. Hawksworth finished third last year at Mid-Ohio in Indy Lights.

Three of the four Ganassi cars start on the final two rows. Ryan Briscoe and Charlie Kimball make up row ten. Briscoe had been in the top ten most of the weekend before bringing out a red flag in qualifying, negating the Australians fastest two laps. Kimball remains the driver with the worst average starting position this season but Kimball makes up more positions over the course of a race than any other driver, averaging 5.92 positions gained a race. 

Takuma Sato will start twenty-first. The Japanese driver is looking for consecutive top ten finishes for the first time since last year when he won at Long Beach and then finish second at São Paulo in the following race. Scott Dixon will start twenty-second. He started twenty-second in Belle Isle 2 earlier this year and finished fourth. The furthest back a winner has ever come from in an IndyCar road/street course race was twenty-fifth when Max Papis won at Laguna Seca in 2001. Dixon's first career win at Nazareth in 2001 came from twenty-third position. 

NBCSN's coverage of the Honda 200 begins at 3:00 p.m. ET with green flag at 3:50 p.m. ET.