Road America IndyCar: Rossi leads Herta in first practice

Despite a guaranteed 75 minutes of track time, most drivers remained on pitlane after their installation laps since they were yearning for another set of tires. The teams were granted their ‘practice’ Firestone alternates for this session, rather than second practice, but still, the drivers wanted rubber laid down to be most representative of the expected track conditions in qualifying tomorrow.

On primary tires, Romain Grosjean of Andretti Autosport-Honda was the first to crack the 1min47sec barrier with a 1min46.9302, but teammates Alexander Rossi and Colton Herta eclipsed him by over two-tenths of a second.

Chip Ganassi Racing-Honda’s latest Indy 500 winner Marcus Ericsson delivered a 1min46.8876 to sneak into third and also shade Grosjean, while behind the ex-F1 drivers were the Team Penske-Chevrolet drivers Will Power, Josef Newgarden and Scott McLaughlin, with defending Road America winner Alex Palou of Ganassi just ahead of the Kiwi.

As drivers started emerging on their reds with little more than 20mins to go, Helio Castroneves spun his Meyer Shank Racing-Honda down at Canada Corner and stalled, bringing out the red flag.

With 14mins to go, the green waved once more, and Newgarden delivered a 1min46.1714sec to go top, the first driver to run a 136mph lap, and lowered it next time by to 1min46.0594. The second Meyer Shank car of Simon Pagenaud moved up to fourth and then third next time by.

However, as everyone was out on reds, the leader board quickly changed, with Herta bursting to the top with a 1min45.7361sec, and McLaughlin making a spectacular effort to go to 1min45.9.

Then Rossi’s second flyer on reds pushed him 0.1334sec ahead of Herta to set a 1min45.6027sec, while Power’s 1min45.8592 made him fastest of the Penskes, fastest Chevrolet driver, but was still a quarter second off Rossi’s benchmark. It left him third, until Ericsson went fastest of the Ganassi drivers to move ahead of him.

In fact from third through eighth, it was Ganassi-Penske-Ganassi-Penske-Ganassi-Penske followed by ‘ex-Penske’ in the form of Pagenaud.

Pato O’Ward and Felix Rosenqvist both got their Arrow McLaren SP-Hondas into the top dozen, split by rookie Devlin DeFrancesco. Teammate Grosjean was left with an unrepresentative red-tire time as he had been on his second flyer when the session was red-flagged for Castroneves.

In the battle for Rookie of the Year honors, current points leader Christian Lundgaard was second fastest (behind DeFrancesco) and 13th overall for Rahal Letterman Lanigan-Honda, while Callum Ilott was an impressive 15^th for Juncos Hollinger-Chevrolet, as he made his return to action after skipping the Detroit GP to rest his broken hand.

Simona De Silvestro’s return to IndyCar road course action for the first time since 2015, might look disappointing at first, in that she was 3.15sec off the ultimate pace. However, her team Paretta Autosport is in a technical alliance with Ed Carpenter Racing, and she was 1.8sec off Conor Daly and only 1sec behind Rinus VeeKay.

Second practice begins on Saturday at 9.45am local (Central) time.