The first day of the IZOD IndyCar Series' Edmonton event was officially rained out, with practice and qualifying now compressed into Saturday.
Persistent rain all day left large amounts of standing water on the track and in the paddock, leaving drivers to chase other pursuits (ABOVE). After a series of delays to the program, officials admitted defeat shortly after 3 p.m, local time and decided that no track action would take place today.
The revised schedule now sees two 45-minute practice sessions timetabled for 11:40 a.m. and 1:25 p.m. ET on Saturday, with qualifying set to run at 5.30 p.m. as planned.
The washout was especially frustrating for drivers and engineers, since they were denied time to get acquainted with the newly revised airport/temporary circuit. Turn 1 – a hard left-hander after a long straight -- will be among the most challenging to master Dario Franchitti reckoned.
“There are three very heavy braking zones from long straights," said the championship leader "I think it will be racy and tough on brakes, actually. Turn 1 is wide and then it narrows up very quickly. I think part of the thing that's been talked about are the lines on either side of track are not out of bounds. You can go all kinds of places, but you have to remember it narrows up very much in the middle of Turn 1. Hopefully, we all control ourselves.”