Action Express Racing will start from pole position at tomorrow's Detroit round of the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship following a post-qualifying decision to sort the grid by championship positions.
Christian Fittipaldi set the fifth quickest time of the Friday afternoon shootout at Belle Isle, but an accident for provisional pole-sitter Ricky Taylor prompted a reshuffling of the order that put the Brazilian driver on top.
Taylor had just set the quickest time with seven minutes completed when he lost the rear of his WTR Cadillac DPi and pitched sideways into the outside wall, bringing out the red flags.
The 27-year-old was unhurt but his car’s time was deleted for causing the stoppage, along with all times set by the other cars because IMSA qualifying sessions require 10 minutes of running to be declared official.
That put Fittipaldi and João Barbosa on pole position with their Action Express Racing Cadillac DPi sat behind the WTR car in the standings.
"It is a lot easier to drive a race car than go through all of this rule complication to get a pole position," said Fittipaldi.
"I am happy to be starting in the front. I am still a little frustrated the way it happened. We have an extremely competitive car and I wanted to show that in qualifying."
"Sometimes the rules go in your favor and sometimes they don't – today they did."
Joining Fittipaldi on the front row of the grid will be the sister Action Express Cadillac driven by Eric Curran and Dane Cameron.
The JDC-Miller Motorsports ORECA 07-Gibson and the #2 ESM Nissan DPi are slated to share row two, with the #70 Mazda DPi completing the top five.
Following Taylor's crash, Renger van der Zande topped the qualifying timesheets with a time of 1:24.693s behind the wheel of the Visit Florida Racing Riley/Multimatic Mk.30-Gibson, but the Dutch driver will be forced to start from ninth based on the team's position in the points.
With GT Le Mans on a break, the GT Daytona class stepped in to fill the void as the top GT category at Detroit.
In a tight and uninterrupted session, Audi became the fourth different manufacturer to take pole in 2017 thanks to a 1:32.200s marker from Lawson Aschenbach in the Stevenson Motorsports R8 LMS.
Aschenbach waited until the final opportunity to bank his fastest time, which eclipsed the second-best time of Katherine Legge in the #93 Michael Shank Racing Acura NSX-GT3 by 0.341 seconds.
Bryan Sellers and Cory Lewis qualified their Lamborghini Huracan GT3s on the second row, ahead of the Scott Pruett/Sage Karam Lexus.
Prototype Challenge was led comfortably by Performance Tech Motorsports driver James French, who put a gap of five seconds between himself and Tony Drissi behind.
The one hour and 40 minute sprint race is set to get underway at 12:40 local time (UTC-5) tomorrow (Saturday, June 3rd).
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