Acura Team Penske Goes 1-2 in Final Practice

Ricky Taylor set the fastest lap of the third and final IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship practice session before qualifying for tomorrow’s race at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca.

The Acura Team Penske driver set a time of 1:15.497 early in the one-hour Saturday morning run, shaving six-tenths of a second off the previous best time of the weekend.

Taylor’s effort put the No. 7 Acura ARX-05 DPi three-tenths ahead of the Penske team’s sister No. 6 car which sat second in the order thanks to Juan Pablo Montoya’s 1:15.857.

However, it wasn’t an entirely clean run for Acura in Practice 3, as a spin for the No. 7 car upon entry to the Corkscrew brought out a brief red flag midway through the session.

Third in the overall classification was Renger van der Zande who steered the No. 10 Wayne Taylor Racing Cadillac DPi-V.R to a time of 1:16.035, which was enough to narrowly beat the best of the Mazda RT24-P DPi entries by 0.053 seconds.

Oliver Jarvis put the Japanese manufacturer in fourth, while Filipe Albuquerque rounded out the top five in the best of the Action Express-operated Cadillacs.

In GT Le Mans, Ford Chip Ganassi Racing’s Richard Westbrook topped the class for the second time this weekend, having already posted a session-leading time in Practice 1.

The Englishman erased half a second from his original 1:22.548 number, and was the closest GTLM driver to dipping under the 1m 22s barrier.

Westbrook ended the session with two-tenths in hand to Tom Blomqvist in the No. 25 Team RLL BMW M8 GTE, while Dirk Mueller lapped third-quickest in the other Ford GT.

Fastest in GT Daytona was Robby Foley who steered the No. 96 Turner Motorsports BMW M6 GT3 to a time of 1:24.523.

Foley led a tightly-packed class field that was separated by less than a second from the first car in the classification down to the eleventh and final car.

Kyle Masson set the pace in LMP2 for the Performance Tech Motorsports squad.

Qualifying for the penultimate round of the WeatherTech Championship is set to take place at 1:40 p.m. local time (3.40 p.m. ET).

RESULTS: Practice 3