Lakeville, Conn., (July 16, 2021) – Cooper MacNeil (Hinsdale, Ill.) and Mathieu Jaminet (France) will start tomorrow’s running of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship Northeast Grand Prix third on the grid.
The second practice session of the day was interrupted by rain and lightning causing IMSA to stop the session. Once practice was restarted there was just 16-minutes left to run. This limited an already abbreviated weekend practice schedule.
MacNeil had the controls of the No. 79 WeatherTech Racing Porsche 911 RSR GTLM for the 15-minute qualifying session around the 1.5-mile, 7-turn circuit located 90-minutes west of Hartford. By the time the green flag dropped, the track had fully dried allowing MacNeil to post a lap of 50.833 good for a third place starting position. The session was not without drama as MacNeil was passing the No. 4 Corvette he got onto the dirty line of the track and went off in Turn 3. He was able to drive the car out of the mud, but a red flag flew which negated his fast time of 50.340.
“The WeatherTech Racing Porsche was really good early on in the session,” MacNeil said. “I was pushing for more. I passed the Corvette into Turn 3. We were side-by-side and I lost the braking a little bit. I broke a little too late, locked up the rears and went around into the grass. Unfortunately, with all of the rain we had earlier it was difficult to get out. I was able to drive it out, but they flew the red flag which deleted my fast lap times. I was able to get back on track and do another lap about a half second off of my fastest. The tires were not ideal and there was mud everywhere. Big thanks to the Proton Competition team. I think we have a good car for the race tomorrow.”
The IMSA WeatherTech Championship Northeast Grand Prix will take the green flag at 3 p.m. ET on Saturday. Live Streaming can be viewed on TrackPass, NBC Sports Gold, NBC Sports App, and NBCSports.com. The television broadcast will air on NBCSN, Saturday, July 17 at 5:30 p.m. ET. IMSA Radio can be heard on IMSA.com and SiriusXM Radio (Sirius 216, XM 202, SiriusXM Online 992).