ESM Nissan leads third Road America practice

ESM Nissan leads third Road America practice

IMSA

ESM Nissan leads third Road America practice

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IMSA teams got down to business Saturday morning at Road America as the 35-car field completed prepared for this afternoon’s qualifying session. The mix of teams atop the standings in Prototype saw its third leader in as many outings at the sprawling road course as Ryan Dalziel (pictured above) moved the Tequila Patron ESM Nissan Onroak DPi team to first (1m53.851s).

The Ligier-built DPi edged Jordan Taylor in the Wayne Taylor Racing Cadillac DPi-V.R (+0.143s) and Stephen Simpson in the JDC-Miller Motorsports ORECA 07 (+0.189s), which served as the first WEC LMP2 representative.

The entire Prototype class was covered by an impressively small margin of 0.632 seconds.

The same cannot be said of the GT Le Mans category, where BMW Team RLL’s Martin Tomczyk (pictured above) was on his own planet with the brawny BMW M6 (2m02.129s). Ford Chip Ganassi Racing GT driver Dirk Muller (+0.537s) and BMW teammate Alexander Sims (+0.960s) had no response in a class where 1.7 seconds spanned the fastest and slowest cars.

Counter to GTLM, GT Daytona fit 16 cars within 0.950 seconds as Stevenson Motorsports’ Lawson Aschenbach led the class in his Audi R8 LMS GT3 (2m06.600s) and Jesse Krohn in the Turner Motorsport BMW M6 GT3 (+0.073s) nearly matched his time. GTD championship leader Christina Nielsen was a close third in the Scuderia Corsa Ferrari 488 GT3 (+0.156s).

Michael Shank Racing’s Katherine Legge suffered a hard crash toward the end of the 60-minute session which brought out a red flag. The two-time GTD race winner was uninjured in the accident, but her No. 93 Acura NSX GT3 was not as fortunate. Extensive repairs will be required in order to make the race on Sunday.

Click here for full results.

UP NEXT: Qualifying, 1:35 ET.

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