Marco leads wet first IndyCar practice in Long Beach

A wet track from earlier rain prevented anyone from setting a representative time, but Andretti got the best of the emerging dry line to post a quickest lap of 1m17.2298s, some six seconds slower than the cars had managed last year.

Takuma Sato was second-quickest in the Rahal Letterman Lanigan entry with a time 0.7 seconds off Andretti's, but the Japanese driver ended the morning in the barriers when he lost the rear of his car and spun into the wall just after Turn 10.

HVM's Simona de Silvestro crashed almost simultaneously at Turn 9, causing the session to be briefly red-flagged. The session returned to green with just 90s left on the clock, meaning that there was little opportunity for anyone to change the order.

AJ Foyt Racing's Mike Conway was third-fastest ahead of KV Racing's Tony Kanaan and Panther's JR Hildebrand, who was one of the few drivers to improve after the restart.

Several drivers, including most of the Ganassi team, elected not to run at all in anticipation of drier conditions over the rest of the weekend.

Pos  Driver               Team/Car                      Time        Gap
 1.  Marco Andretti       Andretti DW12-Chevrolet       1m17.2298s
 2.  Takuma Sato          Rahal DW12-Honda              1m17.9448s  + 0.7150s
 3.  Mike Conway          Foyt DW12-Honda               1m18.2396s  + 1.0098s
 4.  Tony Kanaan          KV DW12-Chevrolet             1m19.2201s  + 1.9903s
 5.  JR Hildebrand        Panther DW12-Chevrolet        1m19.5781s  + 2.3483s
 6.  Ryan Briscoe         Penske DW12-Chevrolet         1m19.6077s  + 2.3779s
 7.  Ryan Hunter-Reay     Andretti DW12-Chevrolet       1m19.6864s  + 2.4566s
 8.  EJ Viso              KV DW12-Chevrolet             1m20.0477s  + 2.8179s
 9.  Helio Castroneves    Penske DW12-Chevrolet         1m20.8696s  + 3.6398s
10.  Scott Dixon          Ganassi DW12-Honda            1m20.8931s  + 3.6633s
11.  Sebastien Bourdais   Dragon DW12-Lotus             1m20.9018s  + 3.6720s
12.  Rubens Barrichello   KV DW12-Chevrolet             1m20.9135s  + 3.6837s
13.  Will Power           Penske DW12-Chevrolet         1m21.2195s  + 3.9897s
14.  Ed Carpenter         Carpenter DW12-Chevrolet      1m22.7224s  + 5.4926s
15.  Oriol Servia         Dreyer & Reinbold DW12-Lotus  1m23.2228s  + 5.993 s
16.  Alex Tagliani        BHA DW12-Lotus                1m24.2307s  + 7.0009s
17.  Simona de Silvestro  HVM DW12-Lotus                1m24.4915s  + 7.2617s
18.  Katherine Legge      Dragon DW12-Lotus             1m25.7130s  + 8.4832s