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Nato tops opening Portland E-Prix practice for Andretti
Norman Nato put Andretti atop of the times on home soil in the opening practice session for this weekend's Portland E-Prix.
The Frenchman set a best time of 1m09.079s, with a session-best first sector, beating both factory Jaguars to the top spot. It wasn’t all good news for Nato, though, after he was given a reprimand for speeding under full course yellow. As it was his third driving infringement reprimand of the season, it resulted in a 10-place grid penalty being levied for Saturday’s race.
Mitch Evans was second fastest, 0.174s behind Nato and a mere 0.033s ahead of his Jaguar TCS Racing teammate Nick Cassidy, with Antonio Felix da Costa – who found out this week that the appeal against his disqualification from the first Misano E-Prix race was unsuccessful earlier this week – in fourth for TAG Heuer Porsche.
Nyck de Vries was a fine fifth for Mahindra Racing, 0.340s off the top spot, ahead of Abt Cupra's Lucas di Grassi and Pascal Wehrlein in the second works Porsche. Sergio Sette Camara (ERT), Maximilian Guenther (Maserati MSG Racing) and Edoardo Mortara completed the top 10, which was covered by just over 0.5s. Mortara and de Vries, however, found themselves under investigation for a “technical infraction” at the end of the session.
Jehan Daruvala was 0.144s off that top 10, finishing the session 11th in the second Maserati, ahead of reigning champion Jake Dennis (Andretti) Sam Bird (NEOM McLaren), Nico Mueller (Abt Cupra) and the DS Penske pairing of Jean-Eric Vergne and Stoffel Vandoorne.
Jake Hughes was next up for McLaren, with ERT's Dan Ticktum 18th, and Caio Collet – filling in for the unwell Oliver Rowland – 19th for Nissan, two places ahead of his teammate Sacha Fenestraz. The pair were separated by Robin Frijns, with his Envision Racing stablemate Sebastien Buemi completing the field.
Dominik Wilde
Dominik often jokes that he was born in the wrong country – a lover of NASCAR and IndyCar, he covered both in a past life as a junior at Autosport in the UK, but he’s spent most of his career to date covering the sliding and flying antics of the U.S.’ interpretation of rallycross. Rather fitting for a man that says he likes “seeing cars do what they’re not supposed to do”, previously worked for a car stunt show, and once even rolled a rally car with Travis Pastrana. He was also comprehensively beaten in a kart race by Sebastien Loeb once, but who hasn’t been?
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