Foster fastest in Indy Nxt practice on IMS road course

Photo: John Cote

Andretti Autosport’s Louis Foster was fastest in Indy Nxt’s practice session on Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s road course, with qualifying and the race later today.

Jacob Abel set the pace at the start of the 50-minute session with a 1m18.4841s. He was shuffled down to 12th as others came up to pace, with Foster setting a 1m16.1826s to lead HMD Motorsports’ Christian Rasmussen by 0.0395 seconds.

Cape Motorsports’ Jagger Jones remained in the pits with a suspected throttle sensor issue, and after 20 minutes had still not set a lap. Meanwhile HMD’s Nolan Siegel had an off at turn one, but it did not prove disruptive for anyone else.

Eventually Jones did get his car fired up, with 21 minutes left on the clock, and at that point 0.9593s covered the top 16 on pace.

Hunter McElrea made it an Andretti one-two, getting within 0.0334s of Foster’s improved 1m16.0607s pace, then there was drama a Jones’ car started smoking and red flags were waved.

Before that, Rasmussen had managed to go to the top with a 1m16.0276s lap, and when action resumed there was 12-and-a-half minutes left of the session.

Siegel and Cape’s debuting Kiko Porto became the first drivers into the 1m15s with just under nine minutes left, and Siegel improved on his next lap to 1m15.5492s to go four tenths of a second clear.

Foster got within 0.1762s of him with seven minutes to go, and a minute later Porto reduced Siegel’s advantage to 0.0789s as Jones headed back out on track.

Siegel responded with a 1m15.4695s, but his gap at the top was actually reduced further as team-mate Reece Gold got within 0.0314s of the new benchmark laptime.

He was eventually toppled with three minutes remaining, as Foster set a 1m15.3992s. Gold meanwhile was shuffled down to fifth as McElrea and Rasmussen went  third and fourth fastest, both within a tenth of Foster’s pace.

The order went unchanged after that, with Foster fastest by 0.0703s and with just 0.0006s splitting Siegel and McElrea. The top five were covered by 0.0994s, and the top 16 by 0.7542. Jones managed to set 10 laps in total, and was 1.6737s off the pace.

Free practice results