One day ahead of the season finale race weekend, the NTT IndyCar Series held an open test session around the famous Laguna Seca circuit.
All drivers participating in the upcoming race were given a chance to take stock of the newly repaved circuit a day early, giving their teams time to make adjustments before the limited official track running gets underway on Friday afternoon.
After five hours of open track time, it was Will Power that ended up setting the fastest lap around the 2.24-mile course in southern California.
The veteran set a time of 1:07.2762, which is well faster than cars have been able to run in recent years.
New pavement provided plenty of grip for the open wheeled cars to utilize, and Power’s pole time from last season of 1:11.6127 looked downright slow compared to the times set during the test.
The times were so fast that a full third of the drivers participating set times that were faster than the all-time IndyCar pole record, which was set by Helio Castroneves in the year 2000.
Among the best performing drivers were Christian Lundgaard and Scott McLaughlin, who set the second the third fastest times of the day.
The rookie Juri Vips had a mightily impressive day just four days after his IndyCar debut, and was able to set the fourth fastest time in the #30 RLL Honda.
Marcus Ericcson was the fifth fastest, and was followed closely by all three Arrow McLaren drivers, who have been very near each other in performance for much of the later portion of the 2023 season.
The newly-crowned champion Alex Palou set the 12th best time, and only turned 40 laps on the course where he blew away the competition in last year’s finale.
There were 1378 laps turned in total by all the drivers, with Power completing the most with 70. Devlin DeFrancesco set the fewest with only 26 laps turned, and he ended 21st on the timing chart.
Of course, outright speeds are not as important during the test as they are during the race weekend. Teams use the time to trial out many different setups and parts in order to be better prepared for when the speed does matter.
In this particular case, the newly-paved track provided plenty of new challenges, and gave everyone one extra day to figure out how best to adjust the myriad of settings available across the car.
The first practice session of the Laguna Seca race weekend takes place Friday afternoon at 2:30 PM Pacific Time.
