Andretti Green Racing drivers swept the top three spots during the first half-day of open testing at Sebring International Raceway, as attention switched from oval preparation to that for the season's road and street courses.
Nine drivers graced the first outing for the IndyCar Series at the historic Sebring airfield circuit, running throughout Monday afternoon in readiness for a full day of testing Tuesday [4 March]. Nine other drivers will test on Wednesday and all day Thursday. As expected none of the teams reckoned to be making the switch from the near-defunct Champ Car World Series were present, and will have to rely on specially-arranged sessions closer to the start of the season in an effort to get up to speed for the Homestead-Miami opener.
Tony Kanaan turned in the fastest lap of the day on the circuit's 1.7-mile layout, clocking 53.5174secs to lead an AGR 1-2-3 completed by team-mates Marco Andretti and Hideki Mutoh. The team's fourth driver, Danica Patrick, was unable to repeat her frontrunning form from last week's Homestead test, and was edged out of fourth late in the day by Rahal Letterman Racing's Ryan Hunter-Reay.
"We're testing a lot of things, trying big, big things that we did some simulation on over the winter and thought were better," Kanaan revealed, "Changing big things in the car, that takes an hour, sometimes two hours, and this is the time to do it, because we won't have time when we get to St Pete. It's the last two days [of testing], now it's down to one day, before the season starts and before we go to St Pete, but I would say it's going well."
AJ Foyt IV, rookie Jay Howard, Ed Carpenter and owner/driver Marty Roth all got track time during the day, but were unable to dislodge the top five.
"[Today was] not as great as we would like," Andretti admitted, having lapped three-tenths slower than Kanaan, "We still have to work on gaining overall mechanical grip. However, we're doing a true test. If we can find some mechanical grip and balance tomorrow, I think we're going to be happy."
