IndyCar took to the streets of Toronto on Saturday morning, turning practice laps in preparation for an important qualifying session later in the day.
Andretti Global was once again the fastest team, with Colton Herta setting the fastest individual time of the session.
Herta lapped the 1.79-mile course in 1:00.0578, just missing out on eclipsing the one minute barrier while completing qualifying simulations.
His team-mate Kyle Kirkwood was just a hair slower, following up his quick Friday performance with another on Saturday morning.
Team Penske was hot the heels of the Andretti duo, with Josef Newgarden and Scott McLaughlin slotting into the third and fourth position on the timesheets.
Pato O’Ward was fifth quickest and reported that his car was as comfortable as can be expected on the slick course.
Unfortunately, Juncos Hollinger Racing appeared to be having nearly as many troubles as they did the day before. Conor Daly and Sting Ray Robb were 24th and 26th quickest respectively, with only Devlin DeFrancesco lapping slower.
All three drivers were two or more seconds off the pace, however, which is an age with the short lap times produced at this venue.
For the second day in a row, Jacob Abel found the wall during his runs. This time he attempted to continue after breaking his second consecutive toe link, which sent him spinning into the wall and doing more damage than the day before.
He and his Dale Coyne Racing crew will need to come up with a game plan to keep a larger margin to the barriers before qualifying later in the day.
Track adjustments
IndyCar worked with track crews overnight to add a strip of new asphalt leading into Turn 3 to help alleviate a large bump in the track that was bothering drivers on Friday.
The result was a bit smoother trip through the hardest braking zone on the track, but multiple drivers still found themselves locking their front wheels when attempting qualifying simulations.
During qualifying later in the day, drivers will surely have trouble with the same bump, which stretches all the way across the track.
Another problematic feature of the Toronto course was slightly improved on Saturday, with the extremely slick track surface beginning to hold grip as more and more rubber has been laid down.
It is still one of the more slippery courses on the calendar, however, and a couple drivers slid sideways and bounced their wheels off the concrete barriers.
Session leader Herta was among those that gathered a bit of concrete dust on the outside of his tires at one point.
Knockout qualifying takes place at 2:30 PM eastern time, giving teams only a few hours to make adjustments after practice concluded.
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