AMERICAN LE MANS SERIES NEWS - SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH 18 MAY 2008 |
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The Drayson-Barwell American Le Mans Series (ALMS) team was competing in round four of the championship at Salt Lake City, Utah today with its Aston Martin Vantage GT2. The team had made good strides forward with the handling of the E85 (2nd Generation) Bio-Ethanol fuelled car during the practice sessions, but the race ultimately ended in disappointment as an engine failure meant the premature retirement of the Paul Drayson/Jonny Cocker-driven GT2 class machine after an hour of racing. After the team had made history last time out at Long Beach by claiming the first ever race finish for the new Aston Martin Racing-built GT2 car, we had high hopes of moving up the leader board this weekend. Chief Engineer, Mark Lemmer, and his squad did a great job during Friday and Saturday’s test sessions to find a significant improvement in the handling performance of the Vantage GT2 chassis. Our tyre partner, Dunlop, has also been putting in a superb effort to provide us with new compounds to try at the fantastic Miller Motorsports Circuit in Salt Lake City. These practice sessions were effectively the first proper test sessions that we have been able to do with the car, as there was no time at Long Beach to really work on the performance of the chassis. We definitely made progress as we closed the lap time gap to the GT2 leaders in practice and official qualifying, but it is still clear that we have an engine performance disadvantage over most of our class rivals which hurt us on the long straights at the high-speed Miller facility. Jonny started the 2hr 45 mins race and set to work on trying to move up from our 14th (out of 16 cars in GT2) place qualifying spot. He put in a great performance to mix it with the midfield pack of the Panoz, Ford GT and the slower Porsches and Ferraris, and moved up to 11th spot when the race entered a phase of having two ‘full course yellow’ caution periods in quick succession. The team made a good call to bring him into the pits during the second one of these, and the Drayson-Barwell crew re-fuelled and changed a front tyre in super-quick time so that Jonny rejoined whilst the race was still under yellow ‘pace car’ conditions. Meanwhile many of our rivals didn’t take advantage of this opportunity, and others who had were set to have to come back in to the pits to take a time penalty for pit lane infringements. At this stage of the game, we were therefore looking good for a potential strong top-10 finish, with Paul due to take over shortly in what would be the final pit stop for the car. Sadly, the engine failure put paid to those hopes, and although we took the car back into the garage and attempted to find a solution it soon became clear that the failure was a terminal one. NEXT RACE |
