AMERICAN LE MANS SERIES NEWS - PETIT LE MANS 04 OCTOBER 2008
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• sweet to claim 2nd place in the inaugural Green Challenge • bitter - not to finish after over 8.5 hours of racing The Drayson-Barwell ALMS team contested the ‘Blue Riband' event of the season today, the Petit Le Mans 1000-mile race around the fabulous Road Atlanta track in Georgia. Regular drivers Paul Drayson and Jon ny Cocker were joined by works Aston Martin Racing driver, Darren Turner for the 10-hour endurance classic. The team and drivers had worked hard on improving the performance of its Aston Martin Vantage GT2 during last week's test and practice sessions, and by the time of official qualifying on Friday had made significant progress. We put in our best performance to date, qualifying 8 th in GT2 and just over a second off the pole-sitting Ferrari. During the opening stint of the race Jon ny put in a great performance to hang on to the GT2 leaders, and some superb strategy calls to use the caution periods from the crew kept us right in the thick of the fight for GT2 top honours. Darren took over with the car in 7 th spot, and then during his stint those earlier strategy calls really paid dividends as other teams made their pit stops under ‘green' racing conditions. He reached a peak of 3 rd position behind the leading Porsche and Ferrari, and after three hours we were genuine contenders for a podium place. Paul then kept up the good work during his stint, and continued our strong trouble-free run. We then suffered some misfortune as problems with the bonnet fixings and power steering system meant we had to make some unscheduled stops. This dropped us back down the order, but as the race went into its 9 th hour we had just moved back up to sixth place with Darren back at the wheel. Our dreams were shattered sadly when he came on the radio to report that he had lost drive as the result of a suspected driveshaft failure. All in all however, we had shown very strong pace with the still relatively new Vantage, and had taken the car into new territory in terms of distance run. A consolation prize for the team came in the form of achieving 2 nd place behind the factory Corvette GT1 in the inaugural Green Challenge. This was a competition including the entire ALMS field – a race-within-a-race in which all cars were scored on overall performance, fuel efficiency and environmental impact. This important result was achieved through a combination of good pace and the use of environmentally-friendly ‘2 nd Generation' E85 bio-ethanol fuel.
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