Herta was the first driver to drop into the 66-second bracket around the 1.968-mile course, clocking a 1m06.5710s on his sixth lap which at the time left him half a second clear of the field. However with 35 minutes to go, a spin at Turn 6 caused last year’s Long Beach winner to strike the wall with his rear wing.
While this was being fixed, Scott McLaughlin and Felix Rosenqvist threw in strong laps, the latter’s Arrow McLaren SP-Chevrolet only 0.0730s slower than Herta. The Swede's team-mate Pato O’Ward then had a brief trip into the Turn 9 runoff that required a pushstart.
