Christian Fittipaldi headed up a top-three sweep for the new Cadillac DPi-V.R car in opening practice for the Rolex 24 at Daytona International Speedway on Thursday.
Fittipaldi posted a fastest lap time of 1:38.196 behind the wheel of the #5 Action Express Racing entry to finish nine-tenths of a second clear at the top of the timesheets in a quiet first session at Daytona, which acted as the first official running for the new-for-2017 DPi entries.
Cadillac's 2017 model locked out the top three positions, with Fittipaldi being followed by Wayne Taylor Racing's Ricky Taylor in the #10 car. Mike Conway secured third in the final standings in the second Action Express entry, finishing a further 0.1 seconds behind Taylor.
Ben Hanley finished as the quickest non-DPi driver in fourth place for DragonSpeed in the #81 ORECA, while Mathias Beche rounded out the top five in the #85 JDC-Miller Motorsports entry.
The GT Le Mans class was paced by Olivier Pla in the #68 Ford GT, but was run close by Laurens Vanthoor in the #912 Porsche 911 RSR as the Belgian finished just 0.029 seconds further back.
Less than half a second separated the top seven cars in class, with Toni Vilander breaking up the Ford-Porsche dominance at the head of the field in fourth place for Risi Competizione. Alessandro Balzan topped GT Daytona for Scuderia Corsa in the #63 Ferrari 488 GT3.
The session was interrupted by two red flag periods coming at either end of the hour-long running. The first was called 10 minutes into the session for a track inspection, with the second coming following a stoppage for the #13 Rebellion Racing ORECA that ended practice.
