ELKHART LAKE— Coming up on the three year anniversary of his last NTT IndyCar Series win, Alexander Rossi led the opening practice session for Sunday’s (June 12) Sonsio Grand Prix at Road America.
Rossi went around the 14-turn, 4.014 mile road course in 1 minute, 45.6027 seconds to average 136.837 mph in the No. 27 Andretti Autosport Honda. Second fastest was Rossi’s teammate Colton Herta ahead of 2022 Indianapolis 500 winner Marcus Ericsson.
“It’s a bit weird to have the Firestone alternates on day one, so it will be interesting to see how that translates tomorrow,” Rossi said. “Obviously the track evolution will continue to get better every session of the weekend. We’ll have to see how that translates from practice one all the way to qualifying.
“The car rolled off really strong, which is positive on these weekends where it’s so close you got to start from a good point. Hats off to the team for the effort that they did in the prep for this event. We’ve just got to keep it rolling.”
Rossi’s reference to the Firestone alternate tires alludes to INDYCAR’s decision to allow teams to run a set of the red sidewall alternate compound tires that provide more grip at the expense of overall tire life in the opening practice session. Teams were allowed this set of the alternate compound tires because of INDYCAR’s decision to extend Friday’s (June 10) practice session to 75 minutes instead of the traditional 45 minutes of green flag running in a 60 minute window.
INDYCAR did not add any extra sets to the teams’ tire allocation for the weekend, and with Road America predicted to favor the black sidewall tires in the race similar to how the previous race in Detroit worked out, some teams did not use all 75 minutes of track time since teams wanted to save sets of the primary compound tires for qualifying and the race.
“I think INDYCAR thinks they’re doing us a service in giving us more track time, but we don’t get more tires,”
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