FE: Abt and Buemi lead Long Beach practice

Daniel Abt set a record-breaking pace to head Formula E points leader Sebastien Buemi in practice for the Long Beach ePrix.

Abt's practice two best of 56.778 seconds eclipsed his own pole time from last year's race by two tenths of a second.

The Abt Audi Sport driver jumped Buemi and Lucas di Grassi to go top of the times with less than 10 minutes of the second practice session remaining. He outpaced Renault e.dams' Buemi by 0.174s, with the second Abt Schaeffler FE01 of di Grassi a further tenth slower in third. It was an encouraging session for the German Abt team at the end of a week in which it accepted responsibility for the weight miscalculation that led to di Grassi being disqualified in Mexico last time out.

Buemi had topped opening practice and seemed on course to replicate the feat before Abt's late improvement. The Swiss driver, who leads di Grassi by 22 points in the title race, heads into the pole shootout optimistic of ending a run of three consecutive mistakes in qualifying, after his team discovered an issue with the brake system following the Mexican race.

Behind the two Abt cars and the points leader, underdog stars Antonio Felix da Costa and Robin Frijns continued to shine for Team Aguri and Andretti Autosport respectively. Both drivers were within half a second of Abt's benchmark in fourth and fifth.

Sam Bird again extracted more from the heavy DS Virgin Racing car than team-mate Jean-Eric Vergne to go sixth in practice two, the Briton backing up his second-fastest time in the earlier session. The second Renault e.dams machine was only seventh in the hands of Nicolas Prost, with Bruno Senna, Stephane Sarrazin and Mexico victor Jerome d'Ambrosio completing the top 10.

D'Ambrosio's Dragon Racing team is in a constant fight with Abt to be Renault's nearest challenger this season and struggled to make an impact on Saturday morning.

It failed to break into the top 10 in first practice and while d'Ambrosio got to 0.7s of Abt by the end of the second session team-mate Loic Duval was only 12th and a second off the pace.

PRACTICE ONE TIMES

PRACTICE TWO TIMES

Originally on Autosport.com