NASHVILLE – Rain began to fall during this morning’s Indy NXT practice and as the session went along, the harder the moisture fell. As a result, mother nature delayed the start of the NTT INDYCAR SERIES practice. Luckily, the puddling was resolved and despite a wet 2.17-mile racing surface, the series was able to carve out a 30 minute window to get some running in.

In that session, Chip Ganassi Racing flexed their muscles by having all four cars represented in the top 10 of the speed charts led by Swedish driver Marcus Ericsson. The 32-year-old driver turned in a lap of 1:31.7999-seconds in his No. 8 Dallara-Honda to not only get P1 but got his pick of which group to choose for qualifying later today.

His other teammates went P5 (Marcus Armstrong), P6 (Scott Dixon) and P9 (Alex Palou).

Team Penske also had all their cars in the top 10 too going P3 (Will Power), P4 (Scott McLaughlin) and P8 (Josef Newgarden) to give the pair of organizations 7 of the top 9 speeds in the wet including 5 of the top 6 at that.

Ed Carpenter Racing was a surprise up front in having Rinus VeeKay (1:32.6910-seconds) in P2 and Ryan Hunter-Reay (1:34.2922-seconds) being P7. They were 19th and 20th respectively on Friday.

The lap times were obviously a lot slower in the wet compared to dry conditions in the top lap time on Saturday being 15-seconds slower.

Also, there was a variation between lap times too because the top 12 times on Friday were within a second of each other and 1.8 seconds from 1st to 24th. On Saturday morning, the gap was much larger with Ericsson being .8911-seconds ahead of second. It was over a second defict to third (1.0168-seconds) and 2+ seconds from 6th on back. In fact, 10th place was 3.2875-seconds arrears with it growing to over 6 seconds back from 15th place on.

Surprisingly enough, Andretti Autosport didn’t do much in the session parking 1 of their cars (Romain Grosjean) and being only 13th (Devlin DeFrancesco), 15th (Kyle Kirkwood) and 25th (Colton Herta) respectively.

They struggled in the rain in Toronto and you’d figure with another street course, they’d get out and find some laps.

No one turned many laps overall with VeeKay’s 10 being the most singular laps turned. Everyone else was single digits with 142 total laps being turned in the 30 minute session.