Colton Herta tops IndyCar Portland practice, Bourdais crashes – IndyCar

Sebastien Bourdais topped the second practice at IndyCar’s Portland round moments before crashing, while Colton Herta set the quickest lap across the two sessions.

Bourdais’ Dale Coyne Racing-run car had just edged prior pacesetter Will Power of Penske by 0.0289s when he locked up going into the final corner and hit the tyre wall.

But the Coyne team was able to change Bourdais’s nose section to allow him to participate in the warm-up and pitstop practice session that followed.

The frontrunners were able to run their red tyres in the second practice session but were unable to extract the most from them.

Bourdais’ time on the alternate compound was 0.5s off Herta’s top time in the morning session, which was set on primary black-walled tyres.

Simon Pagenaud suffered a similar incident to Bourdais, with the Penske driver locking up and sliding off the track at the same corner before altering his trajectory in time to avoid the wall.

Penske’s Pagenaud would end up seventh behind top rookies Felix Rosenqvist and Colton Herta in third and fourth, as well as fellow title protagonists Josef Newgarden and Alexander Rossi in fifth and sixth respectively.

Meyer Shank Racing’s Jack Harvey was eighth just ahead of Arrow Schmidt Peterson Motorsports’ James Hinchcliffe.

Last year’s Portland winner, and victor of the last weekend’s race at Gateway, Takuma Sato placed his Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing-run car in 10th.

Scott Dixon was only 11th in the second Ganassi machine, while series returnee Conor Daly was 21st, this time within half a second of temporary team-mate Hinchcliffe.

Dixon had been third in the earlier session, splitting Newgarden and Rossi.

In the same practice, Marco Andretti, Zach Veach and Ryan Hunter-Reay had ensured all Andretti cars were in the top 10 after a test at the same venue two weeks ago.

Practice one result

Practice two result