Joao Barbosa and Ryan Dalziel both claimed fastest times in the opening day of practice for the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship at Indianapolis.
Showing that the Balance of Performance may have been sorted for the first trip around the Brickyard for the TUDOR Championship grid, it was both a Corvette DP and a Honda P2 that took the fastest times in both sessions.
It was Dalziel in the Extreme Speed Motorsport P2 in session one that set a time of 1:18.349 to push his team mate Johannes van Overbeek into second place two tenths down on the Scot.
In the GTLM class it was a Porsche that fired the warning shots as Patrick Long in the #912 Porsche North America 911 snuck ahead of Giancarlo Fisichella in the Risi Competizione Ferrari to show that the Porsche may be strong on a track it first raced at during the Indy 500 more than twenty years ago when it unsuccessfully mated a V8 to a March chassis.
In GTD it was surprisingly neither a Porsche or a Ferrari that finished in fact it was the Turner Motorsport BMW driven by Dane Cameron who beat out fellow German marquee Audi who were represented by Flying Lizards.
Finally in the first free practice session it was Martin Plowman who led the BAR1 PC to a respectable time only 1.5 seconds behind Dalziel in a sign that the PC cars may prove a difficulty to be passed by the P cars.
The afternoon session saw a reversal in the two types of P cars. As mentioned above Joao Barbosa was fastest in the Corvette DP and was quickly followed by the VisitFlorida.com ‘Vette of Richard Westbrook – in a sign of how close the two were, their best times were separated by only seven hundredths of a second.
For Ryan Dalziel this was a poor session after making contact with the #88 BAR1 PC car and damaging the rear of the ESM.
In GTLM it was Bill Auberlen in the RLL Z4 GTE who claimed honours in the only free tyre class as again Fisichella had to settle for second fiddle.
Last but not least was GTD and the Porsche 911 GT America of Jan Heylen finished fastest to ensure it was a solid day for Porsche’s in both the GT classes.
