Wayne Taylor Racing crushes field in qualifying at CoTA

Ricky Taylor and Wayne Taylor Racing will start their No. 10 Cadillac DPi-V.R from the overall pole position after a dominating performance in qualifying for Saturday's IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship Advance Auto Parts Sportscar Showdown at Circuit of The Americas.

WTR topped both practices on Thursday, but missed most of Practice Three Friday morning with minor problems.

Any issues they may have endured were a thing of the past by the time qualifying began, as Taylor turned in a lap of 1:54.809 which was an incredible 1.592 seconds clear of the second-place Nissan Onroak DPi of Johannes van Overbeek for Tequila Patron ESM.

Eric Curran led his Action Express Racing teammate Christian Fittipaldi to third and fourth on the grid, with Jose Gutierrez in the first of the global-spec LMP2 runners in fifth in the PR1/Mathiasen Motorsports Ligier JS P217 Gibson.

James French continued Performance Tech's dominance of the three-car Prototype Challenge field, taking pole position by 2.960 seconds over Stefan Wilson in the first of the BAR1 entries, with the team's sister Oreca FLM09 driven by Don Yount in third.

John Edwards scored a breakthrough pole position for BMW Team RLL, besting a competitive field of nine GT Le Mans competitors that was separated by less than a second in qualifying for the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship Advance Auto Parts Sportscar Showdown at Circuit of The Americas.

Edwards, driving the No. 24 BMW M6 GTLM, displaced Giancarlo Fisichella's Ferrari 488 GT GTE at the top of the class standings in the closing minutes of the 15-minute qualifying session, pipping the Italian by 0.032 seconds.

It was the first pole position for Edwards in the M6 GTLM.

His teammate Alexander Sims made his last lap count, jumping to third in the No. 25 BMW with no time to spare in the session.

The Ford GTs of Ryan Briscoe and Dirk Mueller rounded out the top five for Ford Chip Ganassi Racing.

Mathieu Jaminet took the GT Daytona class pole for Alegra Motorsports in his series debut in the No. 28 Porsche 911 GT3 R, fending off Jack Hawskworth in the No. 15 Lexus RC F GT3 by 0.092 seconds.

Jaminet does have experience at COTA, having raced and won at the circuit last year in Porsche Supercup competition, and was quickly up to speed in his first appearance with the Rolex 24 at Daytona-winning Alegra squad.

Jaminet got the call up to fill in for factory ace Michael Christensen, who is racing for Porsche at the WEC round at Spa this weekend, last Thursday.

Both qualifying sessions ran without major incident.

The Advance Auto Parts Sporscar Showdown is slated to go green at 1:35 p.m. CT, with same-day coverage at 7 p.m. ET on FS1.