Conor Daly on top in Gateway night practice, Kimball crashes

Conor Daly clocked the fastest lap in the waning moments of the final practice session for the Bommarito Automotive Group 500 at the World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway.

The 27-year-old Indianapolis native upstaged pole-sitter Josef Newgarden with a draft-free 181.931 mph average lap just as Carlin Racing teammate Charlie Kimball tagged the Turn 4 wall with less than 10 minutes remaining.

Kimball's No. 23 Carlin Chevrolet came to a halt just past the start/finish line with moderate right front suspension damage. He emerged from the car uninjured, but the session was suspended a few minutes early.

Daly qualified 18th for tomorrow nights run after hitting some oil-dry leftover from some vintage car demonstration laps prior. He took the hiccup in stride and was bullish to have pace in race trim.

"I just told the guys that I wanted to be P1 tonight," he said. "We had a car in qualifying that I was just looking forward to driving. I think we did a lot of work in our only hour session.

"We knew we could qualify well and sadly, you know, the track conditions really took that away from us. I mean we did all we could do with the zero grip that there was in term one and two, but we have a good car. I mean it's good on the long run. We seem to be consistent."

Newgarden wound up second on the timesheets after experiencing some minor engine tremours on his No. 2 Hitachi Team Penske Chevrolet in the hour-long session.

Andretti Autosport's Zach Veach completed an American top-three sweep of the scoring pylon with a lap averaging 181.033 mph that was a slim .0383 of a second behind Newgarden's time. Takuma Sato was the quickest from the Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing camp in fourth ahead of the Chip Ganassi Racing pair of Felix Rosenqvist in fifth and Scott Dixon in sixth.

Second place points man Alexander Rossi ended the night seventh fastest ahead of sixth-place starter Santino Ferrucci and Andretti teammate Ryan Hunter-Reay.