> Result: Pre-Qualifying
Klaus Bachler’s early lap time went unbeaten in the 90-minute Pre-Qualifying session at Indianapolis this lunchtime as teams and drivers made the most of blue skies and a dry track.
Heavy rain had rendered Thursday’s sessions largely pointless given the rest of this weekend’s fine and dry forecast. So the only benchmark came from Wednesday’s test sessions in which Huber’s Porsche set fastest time.
This time it was another 911 GT3 R, albeit in the shape of RS1’s, that topped the timesheets courtesy of Bachler whose 1m23.253s lap after 17 minutes lowered this week’s benchmark by half a second.
0.162s covered the next four cars, while the entire 22-strong field was ultimately separated by just one second.
Triarsi Comeptition’s Ferrari came closest to beating Bachler’s time but fell a tantalising 0.044s short. It was a similar margin ahead of Laurin Heinrich’s Huber Porsche which finished fastest of the 13 Intercontinental GT Challenge Powered by Pirelli entries in third overall.
Team WRT’s BMWs paced last night’s soaking wet practice session and were both once again in the top-five, the #31 M4 driven by Maxime Martin edging out team-mate Philipp Eng in the sister car by 0.035s.
But it was a quiet session for Mercedes-AMG’s two factory IGTC nominations entered by Craft-Bamboo and GruppeM, which finished 12th and 13th.
The three-part qualifying session to determine this evening’s fastest 10 Pole Shootout contenders begins at 15:35 EDT. Watch it live on SRO’s YouTube and Twitch channels.