Qualifying Report: Firestone 600

FT. WORTH, Texas June 5, 2015–Takuma Sato qualified in what he hopes will be a lucky 13th starting spot for the Firestone 600, while teammate Jack Hawksworth will start 17th in his second start at Texas Motor Speedway.

“It’s exciting to be back at Texas Motor Speedway–very fast and it feels good after the very bumpy track at Detroit,” said Sato, who clocked a 216.686mph lap in the No. 14 ABC Supply Honda. “We worked on various things this morning because we only had one practice session before qualifying and we had to figure out the qualifying trim and the race package. The car perhaps isn’t fully optimized but I think the boys did a good job and the car is reasonably fast, so I will be happy with that and hopefully we’ll have a strong package for tomorrow.”

“We didn’t have a great qualifying run but practice went pretty good this morning and the car seems to be working pretty decent in race trim,” said Hawksworth, whose best lap was 215.621mph in the No. 41 ABC Supply Honda. “We have one more practice in race trim and we’ll see if we can dial it in to run up high and run down low because we’re going to have to do some passing tomorrow.”

Will Power took the Verizon P1 pole award with a speed of 218.519mph. His Penske teammates claimed second and third while Carlos Munoz claimed fourth to break up the Penske juggernaut. Juan Pablo Montoya rounded out the top five in qualifying.

The Firestone 600 will be broadcast live on the NBC Sports Network Saturday night starting at 8 p.m. ET.