Will Lucas in the #34 Wheelhouse Motorsports Mustang was the fastest driver on track in the second and final practice of the Mustang Challenge weekend. The series rookie and winner last time out blew the previous fastest time of the day out of the water with a 2:18.760, just under two seconds quicker than Cole Loftsgard’s best time of 2:20.510 in the #42 Round 3 Racing machine.
Loftsgard came out swinging as usual with an impressive hot lap out of the gate, as can be expected from the championship leader at this point in the season, but finished the session second-quickest. He found an extra half a second on track in the second session, but was still 1.3 seconds back of Lucas’s monster effort.
Devin Anderson in the #22 TechSport Racing Mustang was once again third-fastest on track, improving on his time to a 2:20.197. Behind him was Anderson’s new teammate Justin Gravett in the #18 car, 0.2 seconds off Anderson, a big improvement from his mid 2:22s time in FP1.
Fifth fastest came Sandy Satullo in the #7 Wheelhouse Motorsports car, ahead of Ethan Low in the #25 Flying Lion Motorsports car in sixth. Half a second was the difference between Devin Anderson in third and Tate Pritt in seventh position.
Dan McKeever in the #77 Wheelhouse Racing Mustang was once again at the pointy end of the Dark Horse Legends class, setting an impressive lap on his third shot at it, the fastest by just shy of a second to Paolo Salvatore in the #84 Torre Racing car.
Class championship leader Tom Tait in the #8 Wheelhouse car finished third fastest, 1.4 seconds off of McKeever’s time, still struggling to close the gap to his Wheelhouse teammate/team boss.
The session was mostly green and incident-free apart from Chris Clarke wheeling his #9 Paley Motorsport with AAG Racing machine behind the wall in Turn 6 11 minutes into the session. Clarke would eventually return from behind the wall, spending seven minutes off track, and would return to the track only to receive a final track limits warning for taking a shortcut in Turn 5.
Joseph Dederichs, whose Mustang underwent a labour-intensive rebuild following a big incident at Race 2 of VIR, had an issue with the car’s transponder and was shown with no lap times on the board at the end of the session.
The 15-car field will set the grids for Race 1 and Race 2 in qualifying tomorrow morning, Saturday at 10:30 AM track time, with Race 1 that evening at 6:30 PM.
Image courtesy of Ford Racing
