Saturday morning, WILL POWER/No.12 Team Penske Chevrolet was the fastest Verizon IndyCar Series driver in the last practice session of the weekend. He was also fastest early on. His time was 1:08.1696 on the 11-turn, 1.968-mile street course at the 40th Annual Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach. He was one of six different drivers who topped the charts in the 45-minute session. Half of a second separated the top ten drivers, and the top 19 were all within a second of each other. Close, tight driving. 14 of the 23 drivers were faster Saturday morning than the Friday’s fastest lap of 1:09.1488/102.457 mph/ set by SIMON PAGENAUD/No.77 Schmidt Peterson Hamilton Honda.
Power’s teammates, JUAN PABLO MONTOYA/No.2 finished eighth and HELIO CASTRONEVES/No.3, who was one of the early leaders, finished thirteenth.
The other fastest drivers were: TONY KANAAN/10 Target Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet, JOSEF NEWGARDEN/No.67 Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing Honda, JUSTIN WILSON/No.19 Dale Coyne Racing Honda, and twice for MIKE CONWAY/No.20 Ed Carpenter Racing Chevrolet,
The session ran caution free. CHARLIE KIMBALL/No.83 Chip Ganassi Racing Teams drove off into a run-off area, and neatly executed what I’ve always called a F1 U-Turn, and continued on course. Kimball has one of the weekend’s in-car cameras.
Rookies JACK HAWKSWORTH/No.98 BHA/BBM with Curb Agajanian Honda, and MIKHAIL ALESHIN/No.7 Schmidt Peterson Motorsports Honda each ran as high as second early on. Hawksworth in P9, and Aleshin – P13. The third rookie, CARLOS HUERTAS/No.18 Dale Coyne Racing Honda finished P15, as high as he ran.
All 23 drivers have so far participated in every session.
IndyCar qualifying begins at 1:15pm local time.