Colton Herta laid down the fastest lap during Thursday’s test session on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course.
The 22-year-old California native and winner of this year’s GMR Grand Prix at Indy ran 63 laps and the No. 26 Andretti Autosport Honda posted a time of 1m10.5574s around the 2.439-mile road course.
Riding off the momentum of the last three races, Alexander Rossi placed second with a time 0.1923s behind his teammate. Typical for tests with a low car amount, nothing occurred other than cars attacking the track lap after lap. However, Rossi did make contact with a bird on the track.
There was in fact evidence of said bird on the windscreen.
RIP bird. Fly high ? https://t.co/PQKXxLcm54
— Andretti INDYCAR & INDY NXT (@AndrettiIndy) June 23, 2022
Rossi’s future Arrow McLaren SP partner, Pato O’Ward, followed and finished up in third sitting 0.2324s slower than Herta. O’Ward’s current teammate, Felix Rosenqvist, who announced on Thursday he will remain with McLaren for 2023 and beyond, put a lap down that was fourth quickest and logged the most amount of laps with 94 on the board.
Andretti had all of their cars present at the track during the session.
Romain Grosjean rounded out the top five.
The eight hour session was in preparation for next month’s Gallagher Grand Prix, where the NTT IndyCar Series heads back home to run a second race on the season at the Brickyard’s road course. The test also wraps up the second of two this week, the other took place at the Iowa Speedway on Monday.
All Times (Unofficial)
- (26) Colton Herta 1:10.5574 (63 laps)
- (27) Alexander Rossi 1:10.7497 (78 laps)
- (5) Pato O’Ward 1:10.7898 (79 laps)
- (7) Felix Rosenqvist 1:10.8142 (94 laps)
- (28) Romain Grosjean 1:11.1413 (77 laps)
- (29) Devlin DeFrancesco 1:11.1413 (61 laps)
- (14) Kyle Kirkwood 1:11.4427 (60 laps)
- (16) Simona De Silvestro 1:11.8523 (91 laps)
