INDIANAPOLIS — Conditions were oppressive for Saturday’s late afternoon qualifying session for the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship’s TireRack.com Battle on the Bricks at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course, with an ambient temperature of 89 degrees and heat indices in the mid-90s.
Sebastien Bourdais and the No. 01 Cadillac Racing Cadillac V-Series.R were best at beating the heat to top the times overall and for the Grand Touring Prototype (GTP) class. Bourdais claimed the Motul Pole Award for Sunday’s six-hour endurance race with a lap timed at 1 minute, 14.592 seconds (117.712 mph).
A gaggle of dedicated spectators baked in the sun on the viewing mounds lining the 2.439-mile road course’s opening sequence of corners and at the end of the backstretch, while others sought shade in the covered grandstands high atop Turn One of the IMS oval. They saw Bourdais put on a clinic as he earned his seventh pole in IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship action.
Bourdais is also a former sports car race winner at Indianapolis, sharing in a Daytona Prototype class win with Alex Popow in 2012. It was his first pole in 22 attempts at Indianapolis, spread across sports cars and Indy car races on the Speedway’s road course and iconic oval.
“Not a great record, huh? Twenty-two attempts!” joked the 45-year-old Frenchman.
“Obviously it’s always great to be on pole, and it’s a very nice feeling to do it at the home base of Chip Ganassi Racing,” Bourdais continued. “It helps us to stay alive in the championship fight, which is obviously a long shot. But we live to fight another day, and that’s very much the spirit we have for the rest of the season. That Cadillac was quite good today.”
Bourdais and co-driver Renger van der Zande last started from the pole in May at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. Their most recent WeatherTech Championship race win was just before that in Long Beach.
The No. 01 Cadillac duo arrived at Indianapolis ranked third in the GTP championship points standings behind a pair of Porsche Penske Motorsport entries. The championship-leading No. 7 Porsche 963 of Felipe Nasr and Dane Cameron qualified seventh at IMS, while the team’s No. 6 entry earned the third starting spot.
Louis Deletraz and Jordan Taylor (No. 40 Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti Acura ARX-06) earned the outside front row starting spot with a lap of 1:14.817 (117.358 mph), 0.225-seconds off Bourdais’ best lap.
Bourdais believes that traffic will be the biggest issue in Sunday’s race, which for the first time is a round of the IMSA Michelin Endurance Championship. There’s also a possibility of rain.
“We really didn’t know where we stood after practice because qualifying was the only time that we were able to string two or three laps together,” he said. “The density of the traffic, with 56 cars on track, is just insane. That was the big unknown, going into qualifying, and it was a big guessing game. So, we pretty much decided to just trust the read we had from when we tested here a month or so ago and had the track to ourselves. There was no way to know anything else from the practice we had.
“We just stuck to our guns, and it was definitely challenging because the tires got hot really quick and the window to get a lap in was not very wide.”