Colton Herta turned the quickest lap in his morning’s pre qualifying practice session and will lead group 2 in round 1 this afternoon at 2 PM.

The start of practice was delayed 33 minutes because of incidents in support series. In Indy Pro 2000 qualifying, a car spun at the entrance to pit lane and dislodged the tire barrier. In the Porsche Cup qualifying session two cars collided and had hard contact with the wall and tires, moving the wall out of place and severing a camera cable.

There were problems for a few title contenders and several incidents of wall contact. Only two incidents resulted in red flags.

Alex Palou made contact and suffered damage to the left front suspension. he limped into the pits as action continued. Josef Newgarden noticed an oil pressure light on his dash and came into the pits. The car did not return to the track. An engine change might be coming before qualifying.

Romain Grosjean brought out the first red flag after heavy right rear wall contact. He slowly rolled back to the pits with the wheel close to separating from the car. With less than a minute remaining in the session, Takuma Sato had the hardest hit of the day. The car suffered heavy left side damage.

We will probably see some laps under one minute in qualifying on the red tires.

Qualifying begins at 2 PM, and several teams have a lot of work to do.

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