Tristan Vautier captures pole for Rolex 24 qualifier in treacherous Daytona conditions

By Jan 22, 2022, 6:00 PM EST
Rolex 24 qualifying pole
IMSA
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DAYTONA BEACH, Florida — Capitalizing on perfect timing amid rain-induced chaos, Tristan Vautier won the pole position for Sunday’s Rolex 24 at Daytona qualifying race during a treacherous session.

With damp conditions and a persistent Saturday afternoon drizzle narrowing the racing line on the 12-turn, 3.56-mile road course at Daytona International Speedway, Vautier turned a lap of 1 minute, 34.034 seconds early in the session for prototype cars.

That put the JDC-Miller MotorSports No. 5 Cadillac on the pole position for Sunday’s 100-minute race (2:05 p.m., streaming on Peacock) that will set the starting lineup for the 60th Rolex 24 at Daytona.

QUALIFYING: Full results l Results by class l Sector times l Fastest lap sequence l Fastest lap by driver

STARTING GRID: Lineup for the Rolex 24 qualifying race

HOW AND WHEN TO WATCH THE ROLEX 24: Schedule, TV info, start times, entry lists, more

Filipe Albuquerque qualified second in Wayne Taylor Racing’s No. 10 Acura, but his time later was disallowed for failing to meet minimum rear angle specifications in postqualifying inspection.

That gave Cadillacs a sweep of the top four positions with Alex Lynn (No. 02 of Chip Ganassi Racing), Tristan Nunez (No. 31 of Action Express) and Jimmie Johnson (No. 48 of Action Express).

Vautier said his team decided to scoot past nine slower LMP2 cars to post a fast lap as quickly as possible because of the hazardous conditions.

“The track was actually really dry on the line, it was just a few curbs and white lines that were still damp,” he said. “You couldn’t be off line at all, and the wind made it very tricky as well.

“We discussed holding back or trying to pass (the LMP2 cars) as quickly as possible. I said, ‘OK, if I pass the nine of them fast enough, by the time I’m clear, it should be when tires are good.’ That’s what happened. There was quite a lot of traffic with 15 cars, and there was a chance for a red flag, which actually happened.”

With just more than 5 minutes remaining, Renger van der Zande stuffed his No. 01 Chip Ganassi Racing Cadillac into an infield tire barrier. The accident brought out a red flag that effectively ended the session and nullified the two-time Rolex 24 overall winner’s fastest lap, which would have ranked second to Vautier.

“I got stuck in a wall basically in Turn 5,” said van der Zande, who instead will start 10th Sunday after his Chip Ganassi Racing teams repairs the left-front damage to his car. ” Turn 1, 2 and 3 was really good, but I braked too late for Turn 5. Overall, the car felt really nice. I don’t think it’s drama, but it is a bit of drama.”

The hourlong qualifying session was full of drama across all five classes as drivers attempted to navigate a blustery and rainy day.

“I fully expected a red flag, which means you’ve got to get a fast lap in early,” said LMP2 pole-winner Ben Keating, who also will be teamed with Vautier for Sunday’s Rolex 24 as he moves between teams in the top two prototype divisions.”

Kenny Habul won the pole position in GTD, a class that requires amateur drivers qualify the car.

“I absolutely drove my nuts off,” Habul said. “It was wet in places, a little dangerous, and I just kept my boot into it and gave it everything and was one of the rare instances I had a good lap. So I’m happy.”

Even more impressive was that the Bronze-rated amateur driver bested 11 drivers in the GTD Pro division, including NASCAR Xfinity Series champion Austin Cindrdic, who lost control of his Mercedes-AMG GT3 in the Bus Stop chicane.

Cindric will start from the rear Sunday after being one of seven drivers unable to record an official time.

With 61 cars in the 2022 Rolex 24 (the largest field since 2014), traffic management made the inclement weather even more challenging, and Habul speculated that it resulted in lots of conservative driving.

“It was difficult, especially coming out on cold slicks, even if the track was dry, that’s pretty awful,” Habul said. “I was nervous as a butcher’s thumb. She was all over the road. You couldn’t touch the gas. It was pretty wet those first few turns. It was really about survival, and people spinning all over the place in front of me and everywhere.

“To be quite frank with you, there’s no way all those pros behind me were going. There’s no way on God’s Earth that they were giving it everything, because I woudn’t be there. That was clear. You’ve got some of the real superstars of the GT world that are a second off my time. There’s just no way. But nonetheless, it was a good lap, which is unusual for me.”

It also was a solid effort by Johnson as the seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion and full-time NTT IndyCar Series driver turned a lap of 1:34.941 in the No. 48 Ally Cadillac.

“The damp, cold conditions are kind of tough with these light cars,” said Johnson, who will be sharing the car in Sunday’s race with Kamui Kobayashi. “As much as I was nervous about it, I was happy to get some experience doing it. I ended up running my fastest lap I’ve ever run around here. I am happy to see my progression. Happy that the team keeps giving me these opportunities to learn. We will go for more tomorrow.”

Everyone is expected to be giving it their all after last year’s inaugural Rolex 24 qualifying race triggered allegations from the race winners of sandbagging by their opponents.

SATURDAY MORNING PRACTICE: Speeds l Speeds by class l Speeds by driver l Fastest lap sequence l Combined results

The build-up to the season opener of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship often is rife with accusations of teams underplaying lap times to avoid being hindered by rules tweaks under series officials’ “Balance of Performance” policy (which might be less of a factor with DPi being replaced next year by the new LMDh category).

“IMSA has a good handle on BoP in the last year of the DPi,” Vautier said. “I don’t think there’s many games going on.”

For the 2012 Indy Lights champion, whose underdog team won the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring last year, the pole was a good indicator of improvement.

“It’s important to validate speed, but it’s very early,” Vautier said. “It’s qualifying for a qualifying race. There’s a lot of work ahead. There’s not much time to celebrate. There’s another practice very soon.”

Cameron Shields (LMP3) and Alexandre Imperatori (GTD Pro) also qualified first in class for Sunday’s 100-minute race, which will require a driver change for each car.

Saturday’s IMSA schedule at Daytona concluded with a two-hour practice under the lights.

Indy 500 red flag calls still raising many questions and criticism from IndyCar drivers

By Jun 2, 2023, 6:00 PM EDT
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DETROIT – When the yellow flag flew with three laps remaining in the 107th Indy 500, Marcus Ericsson thought his moment had arrived just after he had seized it.

After two red flags to help ensure a green-flag finish to the Greatest Spectacle in Racing, Ericsson had jumped up on the wheel of the No. 8 Dallara-Honda to take the lead from Josef Newgarden on a restart just seconds before a multicar crash triggered the caution.

“I knew that I better get to the lead as soon as possible because another yellow, that’s going to be it,” Ericsson said  Friday before the first practice for the Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix. “This is the one. Better get to the lead and keep that lead, because this is going to be it.

“When I got that lead, and it went yellow, I was screaming in my helmet for a lap and a half, ‘Call it! Call it! Call it! Call it!’ They have to call it.”

INDYCAR IN DETROIT: Entry list, schedule, TV info for this weekend

JOSEF’S FAMILY TIES: Newgarden wins Indy 500 with wisdom of father, wife

The call that the IndyCar scoring tower made was not the one that the Chip Ganassi Racing driver wanted.

Rather than let the laps run out under yellow with Ericsson as the first repeat Indy 500 winner in two decades, IndyCar stopped the race and restarted in a virtually unprecedented situation: Throwing the green and white flag for a one-lap shootout shortly after cars exited the pits.

“As soon as they pressed that red flag button, I was done,” Ericsson said, knowing that the leader had been passed by the second-place car on virtually every restart – just as Newgarden did to win his first Indy 500. “I knew that was it.”

The decision by IndyCar to throw an unprecedented three red flags at the Brickyard – and what it means for the future – remained a hot-button topic as the action shifted to an entirely different locale.

During a lengthy meeting Friday morning, the main topic of discussion between IndyCar drivers and officials was the nine-turn, 1.7-mile downtown layout that is the new site for the Detroit GP after a 30-year run on the Belle Isle course.

The track is an extremely bumpy ride (with manhole covers aplenty) through the Motor City with a hairpin turn, a 0.9-mile straightaway and a pit lane that will split the 27-car field into stopping on opposite sites before blending into a tight exit and into traffic just before a hard left-hand turn into a 90-degree first corner.

So, there was much to hash out before even broaching the NTT IndyCar Series’ seemingly fluid protocols for using a red flag to avoid a yellow-flag ending.

But Ericsson and others believe that discussion needed to happen yesterday. On separate podcasts this week, Alexander Rossi and Conor Daly both questioned the wisdom of throwing a red flag with only enough time to allow a single lap of green to end the race.

“It’s just not safe,” Rossi said on the “Off Track” podcast. “Sometimes, you just can’t get it done.”

On the “Speed Street” podcast, Daly took issue with IndyCar’s first red flag with 16 to go, noting the cleanup probably could have been completed with at least six laps left.

“We understand the race needs to be finished under green,” Daly said. “It brought on a first-time situation of literally leaving the pits when we went green. Like I’ve never done that in my entire career, and I found that astounding. If I was (Ericsson), and I hadn’t won the Indy 500, I’d be furious. If that’s what stopped me from winning the Indy 500, I’d go to war.”

In an Indy Star story, Graham Rahal and Ed Carpenter also felt as if the red flags were bungled.

While the moral support might be reassuring, it still is of little solace to Ericsson. Friday, he was in a much more measured and typically upbeat mood (after gritting his teeth through postrace interviews Sunday), but the fire still burned that he felt wronged.

“I don’t want to sound like a sore loser, and I try and not be that guy,” Ericsson said. “I don’t want to take anything away from Josef. He did a tremendous job, a fantastic race. I just think that us as a series should discuss this and have something in place where if there’s a yellow with this many laps to go, we do that. It can be simple. If there’s less than three laps to go, it’s yellow. (The race is) done.

“I don’t want to sound like a bad loser or anything. But from a sporting perspective, we should have something in place that we know what happens in a situation like this. What is tough is three years ago, a very similar thing happened, and race control made a completely different decision that decides the winner of the race.”

Ericsson is referring to the 2020 Indy 500, which became the 19th to end under yellow because of a heavy impact by Spencer Pigot with the pit lane attenuator. With four laps remaining, IndyCar declined to throw the red flag and released a statement that “there were too few laps remaining to gather the field behind the pace car for a green-flag finish,” indicating there needed to be at least a full pace lap before two laps of green.

“That makes it hard to accept what happened Sunday,” Ericsson said. “I don’t struggle with finishing second. Someone has to, and it’s going to be small margins. On that last restart before the red, if I’d been hundredths of a second slower on that restart, I’d be second behind Josef on the last restart, and I would have been winning the race (on the final restart). It’s all small margins. I’m fine with that.

“What I don’t think was fair was the way race control made a decision. It’s up to them to decide and feel the situation. They don’t have a certain rule or anything. That’s where the sporting integrity, it’s a thin line when it ends like that. When they did that call, it was too late in my book. There weren’t enough laps left to do. If they did, it had to be straightaway. They (held the last red) for a lap and a half and missed that window in my world.”

Scott Dixon was the runner-up to Takuma Sato in the 2020 race, and he said Sunday’s finish raises questions about the consistency of IndyCar officiating.

“The problem I’ve got is you’ve got someone who is determining the race and how it finishes,” Dixon said. “Even though they don’t think they are as a group, it does. It’s the same thing they’re doing on road and street courses. They’re leaving a car stranded, and the driver isn’t not able to get out until everybody pits but then they’re waiting until the last guy pits so he has a massive advantage. They’re still altering the outcome of a race.”

The six-time IndyCar champion said IndyCar also erred by waiting a lap and a half before throwing the third red flag.

“We used to do it, if there’s a crash, you go yellow and it equals itself out over the season whether you’re on the right side or wrong side of it,” he said. “I don’t know what the fix is. Red has become the trend.”

Alex Palou is among those lobbying for IndyCar to choose a cutoff lap for using the red (and allowing the race to end under caution otherwise).

“I would like something that at least when we go next year, they have to follow the rule,” Palou said. “That would be the best-case scenario. Like, if we don’t have more than 2 laps under green we cannot throw a red.”

Palou also openly wondered if intentionally botching a restart might become fair game, noting that IndyCar waved off a restart after the first red flag but kept Pato O’Ward as the leader.

“I don’t know what they’d do if you purposefully do a bad start,” Palou said. “I think I would’ve tried it. Why not? They are throwing you a (bad) rule, you can play it wrong as well.”

If IndyCar had waved off the final restart, Ericsson plausibly could have been declared the winner by forcing the hand of race control.

Ericsson conceded he did consider intentionally slowing down to scatter the field for the final green flag.

“Some people said I should have done that,” he said. “I was thinking about it, and that thought was in my head, but I don’t think that would have been the way to do it, and I think IndyCar would have shown the green either way. I spoke to (race director) Kyle Novak, and he said whatever you’d done, we would have shown the green.”

Ericsson chose the opposite option, going as early as possible in the restart zone at the start of Turn 3 (and catching Newgarden off guard)

“I knew my only chance to win this thing was to get the jump, be in the lead in Turn 1 and 2, and hope someone wrecks in Turn 1 to go yellow again,” Ericsson said.

It didn’t happen, which left the Swede wrestling with many questions and thoughts since painfully revisiting a race replay Wednesday (normally he watches Mondays but “I couldn’t do it the day after; I needed a few days.”).

Ericsson said he actually would have felt better about losing on the final restart if IndyCar had thrown the final red a lap earlier and allowed for a two-lap shootout “because then I would have had a chance to win the race. But it would have felt better for me to lose it. At least then, we’re doing our normal procedure. Now it feels like we went away from the procedure we’ve always done forever for the sake of entertainment instead of the sporting side of it.”

He likes the concept of announcing a cutoff lap at which the red flag no longer can be used (“then it’s super clear, and we would not have this discussion at all because we all know this is what’s going to happen.”), but his primary ask is that the issue gets addressed at least before the 108th Indy 500.

Even without an announced policy, he expects that IndyCar will throw a red flag if there’s a yellow with three laps to go for every race over the rest of the 2023 season.

“Because that’s what we did in Indy, and I hope we’re not going to change that in Detroit, Iowa or something else, because then I’d question are we doing the red flag for the show or for the sport,” he said. “What are we doing it for really? Now we’ve set a standard that this is the way we do things, then I expect it for every race from now on.”