Taylor tops testing then Garcia sets practice pace for USFP2000 finale

Photo: Gavin Baker Photography

USF Pro 2000’s newly crowned champion Max Garcia topped the times in practice for the season finale at Portland.

Practice consisted of a single, half-hour session on Friday but there were two test sessions the day before for drivers to learn the track.

Velocity Racing Development’s Max Taylor was quickest in both, with a 1m07.5426s lap giving him a tiny 0.0719-second advantage over Pabst Racing’s Garcia in session one while a 1m07.6352s put him ahead of VRD team-mate Frankie Mossman by 0.2128s in session two.

Mossman was fifth fastest overall, behind Pabst’s Jacob Douglas and Turn 3 Motorsport’s Alessandro de Tullio. A second covered the top 11, and there were only 16 cars on track as Comet/NCMP Racing’s Logan Adams and Turn 3’s Nicholas Monteiro were absent.

TJ Speed was back up to fielding three cars, as it has added Miles Bromley to its line-up for this weekend. The teenaged Australian has been a race mechanic for the team this season, but now gets into the cockpit. He was Australian Formula Open runner-up last year, and the was the overall winner of several races in an F3 car from the 2000s.

Taylor’s 0.0719s advantage over Garcia in pre-event testing turned into a 0.0993s deficit in practice, with the latter setting a 1m07.4255s.

It was Exclusive Autosport’s Mac Clark who set the pace in the session’s opening stages. He was one of the last drivers out on track, but soon jumped to first place with a lap half a second quicker than anyone else. Clark would then drop down the order as others found improvements on each lap, before jumping back to the top when he crossed the line each time with his own improvement.

That pattern stopped when Taylor posted a 1m07.8116s, putting himself clear of Clark. Although the Canadian would find later improvements, he ended Friday in fourth place.

Taylor did not stay top for long, with Garcia unseating him from first place. He set the fastest lap roughly midway through practice, on his 10th lap of 19, while Taylor improved two laps from the end of his run plan and Mossman’s personal best came on his penultimate lap. That effort put him in third place, 0.1864s behind Garcia and ahead of Clark and Jacob Douglas.

After swapping places with Clark early on, de Tullio concluded practice 0.4s off the pace in sixth. Once again the top 11 was split by a second on pace.

Free practice results