Road America: Warm-up notes

McNISH QUICKEST AGAIN IN ROAD AMERICA WARMUP

Audi completed a perfect pre-race run at Road America as Allan McNish turned in the fastest lap Saturday morning for the Generac 500, the fifth straight session the diesel-powered R10 TDIs captured the top two positions for the four-hour race. McNish's time of 1:50.146 was a tenth of a second better than teammate Emanuele Pirro.

The Audis are right at home on the 4.048-mile, 14-turn road course. The longer straights favor the Audis over the lighter but more nimble LMP2 cars, the quickest of which was Timo Bernhard in Penske Motorsports' No. 7 Porsche RS Spyder.

The McNish/Dindo Capello car will start from pole position this afternoon alongside the Pirro/Marco Werner Audi.

"Road America is a track I love and enjoy and after claiming a second consecutive record pole here, is obviously a circuit well suited to the Audi R10 TDI," McNish said. "We've worked hard setting up the car over the past two days. The engineers did a very good job. I had a very good car for qualifying and one I believe will be excellent for the race too."

After Bernhard's time of 1:50.635 sat the first of Dyson Racing's Porsches, the one driven by Andy Wallace and Butch Leitzinger at 1:52.021. Next was Penske's other Porsche of Sascha Maassen and Ryan Briscoe, 0.04 seconds back.

Johnny O'Connell's last lap turned out to be the fastest in GT1. The defending class winner at Road America posted a lap of 2:01.633 gave him a 0.127-second edge over the other Corvette Racing C6.R of Olivier Beretta and Oliver Gavin. The Doran Racing Maserati MC12 of Didier Theys and Fredy Lienhard was third in class.

Porsche was at the top of GT2 for the first time thanks to Jorg Bergmeister's lap of 2:08.118 in the Flying Lizard Motorsports Porsche 911 GT3 RSR. The German was 0.6 seconds ahead of the Risi Competizione Ferrari F430 GT of Mika Salo and Jaime Melo with the Panoz Team PTG Panoz Esperante GTLM of Bill Auberlen and Joey Hand this in class.

-credit: alms