The NTT IndyCar Series was back on track Friday afternoon for the first time in nearly six months, visiting sunny St. Petersburg, Florida.
The first practice session was held under nearly ideal weather conditions, and it was Florida-native Kyle Kirkwood that topped the timesheets in his Chili’s-sponsored #27 entry.
Kirkwood completed his fast lap near the end of the session, circling the 1.8-mile street course in 1 minute 0.4409 seconds.
The reigning series champion Alex Palou was very close to earning the fastest time, but ended up missing out by 0.15 seconds.
Louis Foster was the fastest rookie of the afternoon, piloting the #45 RLL Honda into an impressive 12th place in his first IndyCar outing.
In a similar vein, the rookie team PREMA showed that it can hold its own even coming in as a brand new outfit.
Callum Ilott set the 18th best time and the team’s rookie driver was 24th quickest on the day. Though not in the top half of the order, simply running competitive times in the first practice session should be counted as a positive milestone for the Italian squad.
Trouble on the streets
As is now going to be standard for all road and street courses this season, the first practice run of the weekend was broken into three parts.
The first 45-minute portion allowed all 27 drivers to take the track, then two group splits followed which allowed alternating halves of the field to take the track for 10 minutes each with more room to move around.
It was during one of those later group runs that the first red flag of the day was displayed.
Marcus Armstrong was the cause of the stoppage as he lost control while navigating the high-speed Turn 3.
The Kiwi expertly kept his #66 Meyer Shank Racing Honda out of the barriers, but only just. The rear of Armstrong’s car stopped a couple inches from the wall, narrowly avoiding any damage.
A few minutes later in the session, Scott McLaughlin drifted wide in the same corner and bounced off the concrete barriers with the left side of his #3 Team Penske machine.
The contact broke his left front steering arm, which then allowed the wheel to fold underneath the chassis and forced him to come to a stop on track.
Turn 3 only caused spins from the two aforementioned drivers, but many others came very close to having incidents of their own.
The corner, which leads onto a long straight, is historically challenging on account of a particularly bumpy stretch of public roads.
This year is extra treacherous in that area, however, likely due to the added weight of the still-new hybrid system.
The electric motor and supercapacitor that powers it was introduced in the middle of last season, and thus was not in place during last year’s event.
Surely there will be a bevy of suspension updates by the teams overnight to help settle the cars over the bumps, with a second practice session scheduled for Saturday morning at 10:15 eastern time.
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