Yahoo Autos Porsche, Corvette lock out both IMSA front rows in Detroit
Porsche Penske Motorsport locked out the front row for the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship at Chevrolet’s Detroit Grand Prix presented by Lear.
Dane Cameron’s 963 was the first car to deliver a sub-66s lap at the downtown 1.7-mile course — a 1m05.770s on his seventh lap — but it was Nick Tandy who delivered the 1m05.390s pole-winning punch, and Cameron’s best effort came up 0.124s short.
There might have been further improvement – there might have been a different front row – but this was rendered moot when Pipo Derani’s efforts to put the Action Express Racing Whelen Engineering Cadillac at the front of the grid ended in the wall and at the back. Derani struck a wall, bending his rear suspension, causing him to spin broadside and block the track. The red flag flew and cost the Brazilian his best two laps, dropping him to 10th.
Sebastien Bourdais was third in the Chip Ganassi Racing Cadillac V-Series.R, just 0.005s ahead of Filipe Albuquerque in the Wayne Taylor Racing w/ Andretti Acura ARX-06. The second Acura of Jordan Taylor will start fifth ahead of the quickest of the BMW M Hybrid V8s.
Josh Tons/Lumen
After a delay for a wall repair following Jack Harvey’s shunt in IndyCar practice, IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship qualifying got underway with the 11 GTD Pro cars taking to the track en masse for their 15-minute session.
Daniel Serra’s fourth lap in the Ferrari 296 was a 1m10.741s, withstanding the fifth-lap efforts of Corvette drivers Tommy Milner and Antonio Garcia.
Their sixth laps were a different story.
Milner set a benchmark of 1min09.949s, just 0.019s ahead of Garcia, yet somehow AO Racing’s Seb Priaulx managed to split them with the Porsche 911 GT3 R.
Priaulx then bested himself to go top, but only for a second, because both Corvettes moved ahead, Garcia producing a 1m09.458s, then 1m09.227s and finally a 1m09.092s on his 13th lap. That left Milner 0.336s adrift but still in second, surviving a scary near-miss with a wall.
Jack Hawksworth scraped walls on his way to third in the Lexus RC F but he was still 0.5s away from Garcia’s remarkable run. Still, he pushed Priaulx down to fourth.
Serra was mere hundredths ahead of Ross Gunn’s Heart of Racing Aston Martin Vantage, while Harry Tincknell and Joey Hand were seventh and ninth in the Ford Mustangs, split by Oliver Jarvis’s McLaren 720S.
