Jack Aitken confirmed a clean sweep of Daytona practice for Cadillac and a second successive session at the top of the classification for the #31 Action Express Racing V-Series.R on Friday afternoon.
The final practice session before tomorrow’s race start for the Daytona 24 Hours took place over an hour of running on the world-famous Speedway road course.
After topping all three sessions on Thursday, Cadillac were looking to complete the sweep on Friday and they started well with Pipo Derani in the #31 Caddy jumping to the top of the times a third of the way into the session, with a 1:36.131s tour of the circuit.
Derain’s full-season teammate Aitken then pushed the pace further with a 1:35.983s lap time 12 minutes later as the reigning IMSA Champions aboard the #31 car looked to further their advantage.
Proceedings came to a halt with 14 minutes of the session remaining when Lance Wilsey stopped at turn 2 in the #33 Ligier LMP2 entry run by Sean Creech Motorsport, with damage to the driver’s left after hitting the left wall (tail end of pit exit) – bringing out a red flag.
The Green Flag waived with roughly seven and a half minutes left on the clock, but
Second went to Connor De Phillippi in the #25 BMW M Hybrid V8 (1:36.222s), ahead of third place Sebastien Bourdais in the #01 Cadillac (1:36.469s).
The top five were completed by Richard Westbrook in the #85 JDC-Miller MotorSports Porsche 963 (1:36.816s) and Neel Jane in the #5 Proton Competition Porsche (1:37.296s).
Next up were the two factory Porsches run by Penske, led by Nick Tandy in the #6 entry (1:37.456s) and followed by Felipe Nasr in the #7 car (1:37.850s).
The remainder of the top 10 saw the #40 Acura ARX-06 run by WTR with Andretti posting the eighth fastest time, courtesy of Louis Deletraz (1:37.973s) followed by the sister #10 entry piloted by Ricky Taylor (1:38.292s) with the #24 BMW slipping to 11th overall behind the leading LMP2 car having only completed four laps.
In the BMW’s four-lap stint, Jesse Krohn posted a 1:39.432s lap time.
The leading LMP2 that split the BMW from the rest of the GTP pack belonged to Mikkel Jensen in the #11 TDS Racing Oreca 07-Gibson (1:39.078s).
Jensen led the #88 Richard Mille AF Corse Oreca piloted by Matthieu Vaxiviere (1:39.785s) and Ryan Dalziel in the #18 Era Motorsport Oreca (1:39.785s) with the trio topping the times in LMP2.
In the GTD contingent, it was the #43 Andretti Motorsports Pro-Am Porsche 911 GT3 effort piloted by reigning DTM Champion Thomas Preining who topped the times with a 1:47.072s tour of the Daytona Road Course.
Preining was followed in the classification by two GTD Pros, namely Matteo Cairoli in the #60 Iron Lynx Lamborghini Huracan GT3 EVO2 (1:47.239s) and Daniel Serra in the #62 Risi Competizione Ferrari 296 GT3 (1:47.386s).
Next up is Green Flag for the Daytona 24 Hours, commencing Saturday at 18:40 local time (13:40 GMT).
