Tom Blomquist has claimed pole position in the #60 Meyer Shank Racing Acura after taking a fresh set of tyres. It’s Acura’s second pole in a row at the Daytona 24 hours.
Blomqvist was followed by the #7 Porsche Penske of Felipe Nasr, with the Konica Minolta Acura of Ricky Taylor behind. This highlights Acura’s strong package that has been on display so far, something they will hope pays dividends next weekend.
Nick Tandy will be disappointed with his Qualifying session, throwing the #6 Porsche off in Le Mans Chicane and ripping the front of the car off.
Tandy made it back to the pits, but as the crew is not allowed to touch the car in qualifying sessions, it was the end of the session for the Porsche.
First up though was the GT qualifying, with GTD Pro and GTD taking to the track.
The session just got better and better as it went on, with entries starting to show their true pace with five minutes of the session to go.
With two minutes left on the clock, it was a battle of the Mercedes AMGs with the Winward Racing taking pole in GTD, with Phill Ellis just beating out the two other AMG’s of Fabian Schiller and Mikaël Grenier.
The AMG dominance continued in the GT Pro class with WeatherTech Racing taking pole, with the Heart of Racing Aston Martin of Ross Gunn joining the AMG on the front row.
Ben Barnicoat in the Vassser Sullivan Lexus followed behind the pair.
Next was the LMP3 field, with their session experiencing some rain, with some sprinkles falling from the sunny California sky.
The rain soon disappeared though, but this didn’t stop the cars from spinning with the #17 starting the spinning compilation, as he did a full 180 at the international horseshoe. Then moments later the #85 went off after taking too much left-hand curb at the Le Mans Chicane, which sent the car into a spin.
But the pole sitter at the end of the session was the #33 Sean Creech Motorsport car by a tenth of a second from the Andretti Autosport car of Dakota Dickerson.
Following them was the Performance Tech car of Cameron Shields, in a session full of ever-changing leaders.
Then we moved to the highly competitive LMP2 class which has really seen massive growth in the last two years in IMSA.
The LMP2 class had the most controversy at this year’s Roar with many of the drivers complaining that the cars have been slowed too much, which they believe puts them in some danger when racing the LMP3 cars.
The #8 Tower Machine car driven by John Farano went off into the tire wall hard at Le Mans Chicane, with the car in the tyres backwards, having dug a hole in the mud from the impact.
The car looked badly damaged with it missing it’s rear wing and the rear right suspension looking in a bad way.
Another car went off at the same time with the# 55 Proton Competition car driven by Fred Poordad also crashing at turn 6 as he locked up and went straight into the tyre wall.
These two incidents brought out a red flag which ended the LMP2 session early.
Ben Keating in the #52 Mathiasen Motorsport Orcea took his fourth pole at Daytona, in a shortened LMP2 session that saw the #35 TDS Racing car driven by Francois Heriau being over a full second off Keating.
They were both then followed by the #11 TDS Racing LMP2, with most of the teams not showing their true pace, as they were still winding up to their fastest lap times.