Sports Car Insiders Feature Stories

Trois Photographes au Canada - It Ain't Tim-Bits

Editor — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:56:33 +0000

Thawley GalleryDole GalleryLefebure GalleryPorsche had a banner weekend with wins overall, GT and of course GT Challenge. Flying Lizard’s duo of Patrick Long and Jörg Bergmeister got back on the winning track with a hard-fought GT victory. Shane Lewis, Lawson Aschenbach and Velox Racing all won for the first time in GTC, a class ORBIT/Paul Miller Racing dominated up until a vicious crash for Luke Hines that eventually brought an early end to the race.

Series Adds Baltimore Grand Prix In 2010

Editor — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:54:09 +0000

©2010 | THAWLEYWednesday was another glorious day for the American Le Mans Series presented by Tequila Patrón. Series President and CEO Scott Atherton, and Corvette Racing’s Johnny O’Connell were part of the contingent on-hand to make official the announcement of the new Baltimore Grand Prix playing host to the Series on Labor Day Weekend 2011.

The venue, which features a 12-turn circuit partially running alongside the picturesque Inner Harbor, marks the American Le Mans Series’ return to the Eastern Seaboard. The last race in the Baltimore area was the 2002 Washington Grand Prix.

Mosport Interupted

Editor — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:50:43 +0000

© 2010 | THAWLEYThe penultimate round of the 2010 American Le Mans Series presented by Tequila Patrón featured one of the biggest crowds for Series event at Mosport International Raceway. What it witnessed was three days of dominance by Muscle Milk Team CytoSport and Porsche as Klaus Graf and Romain Dumas kept the LMP championship in play heading to the final round at Road Atlanta.

Porsche had a banner weekend with wins overall, GT and of course GT Challenge. Flying Lizard’s duo of Patrick Long and Jörg Bergmeister got back on the winning track with a hard-fought GT victory. Shane Lewis, Lawson Aschenbach and Velox Racing all won for the first time in GTC, a class ORBIT/Paul Miller Racing dominated up until a vicious crash for Luke Hines that eventually brought an early end to the race.

The final round of the 2010 American Le Mans Series presented by Tequila Patrón is Petit Le Mans powered by MAZDA2 at Road Atlanta. The 1,000-mile/10-hour race is set for 11:15 a.m. ET on Saturday, October 2. SPEED will air the race starting at 11 a.m., with live radio coverage available on American Le Mans Radio presented by Porsche – a production of Radio Show Limited – as well as Sirius Channel 127 and XM Channel 242. Americanlemans.com will stream qualifying live starting at 3:15 p.m. ET on Friday, October 1. Visit the Series’ schedule page for ticket and accommodation information. Live Timing and Scoring, track schedule, entry list and much, much more will be available on Racehub at americanlemans.com.

Up-close and Personal -Three Days of Road America

Editor — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 03:20:44 +0000

Jonny Cocker went from fourth to first in the last four laps at Road America as Drayson Racing won its first race in the American Le Mans Series presented by Tequila Patrón. And while those four laps put an amazing cap on another great weekend of ALMS racing, Rick Dole, Regis Lefebure and yours truly roamed the pits, the paddock and the back woods of Road America ing readers an up-close and personal look at the three days of Road America.

Regis LefebureJohn ThawleyRick Dole

Drayson Racing Takes Road America For First ALMS Win

Editor — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 03:15:00 +0000

Jonny Cocker went from fourth to first in the last four laps Sunday as Drayson Racing won its first race in the American Le Mans Series presented by Tequila Patrón. Cocker passed Muscle Milk Team CytoSport’s Klaus Graf with two turns left at Road America and won the American Le Mans Series powered by eStar by 1.051 seconds in the Lola-Judd coupe that he shares with Paul Drayson.

Cocker was 6.295 seconds quicker than Graf, who drove with Timo Bernhard, on the final lap. The young Brit passed the Porsche RS Spyder when leading prototype balked while low on fuel during the final lap. Drayson Racing became the fifth entrant to win overall in one season, the most in American Le Mans Series history. Chassis manufacturer Lola won for the second straight race and Judd power won overall for the first time since 1999, the second race of the Series’ now 116 events.

United They Stand

Editor — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 02:57:47 +0000

“It’s a new team, we’ll see if they can digest everything they’ve bit off.”

Eddie Cheever is enjoying a light lunch in the United Autosports hospitality area at the Spa 24 Hours. Approximately 48 hours later, the American former F1 and World Sportscar Championship driver and 1998 Indy 500 winner will stand on the GT3-class podium with his co-drivers Mark Blundell, Zak Brown and Richard Dean. The Anglo-American team, which only came together at the beginning of this season, had been heading for GT3 victory at the Belgian classic, when, with just four hours to go, power-steering failure necessitated a lengthy pitstop that demoted them to third in class. It was nonetheless a very satisfying result for the Leeds, UK and Zionsville, Indiana-based outfit, particularly as its second car, driven by Stefan Johansson, Alain Li, Mark Patterson and Emil Assentato, came home fourth in class. United was one of several customer teams running Audi’s R8 LMS GT3 car at Spa, but with former F1 heavyweights Cheever, Johansson and Blundell on the driving strength, they garnered more attention than most in the run-up to the event. And although they are a new team, expectations were high, thanks both to that illustrious driver line-up and the extensive 24-hour experience of various team personnel.

A Vacuum of NASCAR's Own Creation

Editor — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 02:40:03 +0000

The winds of change blowing through Detroit’s high-performance and motorsports programs threaten to leave one dinosaur out in the cold.

Peter M. De Lorenzo is a national columnist who founded Autoextremist.com, a highly-regarded website devoted to news, commentary and analysis of the auto industry. He is considered to be one of the most influential voices commenting on the business today.The announcement this week that Mark Reuss was re-directing and re-imagining GM’s future high-performance mission - and the motorsports efforts associated with it - should come as no surprise to anyone who has been regularly reading this column. Reuss’s background - before becoming GM’s energized North American leader - was engineering, specifically high-performance engineering, and his roots in the performance arena go way back to his youth. And let’s not forget that Mark’s gig before coming back to the U.S. a year ago was running GM’s Holden operation in Australia - a hotbed of performance and rear-wheel-drive chassis development within the corporation - and also an avid corporate supporter of the V8 Supercars.

Upon his return, Reuss’s early assessment of GM Racing’s direction was that it was in need of an overhaul, in philosophy and execution. Yes, the Corvette Racing program was eminently successful, and what was being developed on the race track was finding its way directly into the production Corvette that consumers could buy, so that clearly wasn’t the problem. As a matter of fact, the Corvette Racing program is a testament as to how a manufacturer should go about running a proper racing enterprise, with a direct technological conduit to the production car program resulting in a better street car by every conceivable measure, including performance, overall efficiency and owner satisfaction.

Dyson Corners Mid-Ohio Sports Car Challenge

Editor — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 07:21:12 +0000

Regis LefebureEverything fell into place for Mazda and the Dyson team at Mid-Ohio on Saturday when the Chris Dyson/Guy Smith No. 16 Castrol Mazda MZR-R-powered Lola took the overall win over the No. 1 Patron Highcroft Racing HPD ARX-01c driven by David Brabham/Simon Pagenaud by .506 of a second, with both first and second place racers setting their fastest race laps within the last 15 laps of the 119 lap race. It was the first overall win for the Mazda MZR-R engine in ALMS competition (the wins in 2009 were in the LMP2 class), the first ever overall win with BP BioFuels Iso-butanol fuel and the first overall win for Dunlop in the ALMS (which finally ended Michelin’s incredible 50-race win streak). Christophe Bouchut and Scott Tucker (No. 55 Level 5 Racing) finished third overall and took the win in the LMP Challenge class running the entire two hour, 45-minute race without changing tires. Considering that ALMS cars must start the race on their qualifying tires and Bouchut ran a session-high 15 laps in qualifying to take the pole, the duo covered 130 laps or 293 miles on a single set of Michelin non-confidential specification tires. The No. 62 Risi Competizione Ferrari driven by Gianmaria (Gimmi) Bruni and Jaime Melo took its third win of the season and moved into second place in the GT championship. The No. 4 Corvette C6R driven by Oliver Gavin and Olivier Beretta battled the Risi Ferrari entry throughout the race, finishing second. The E10-fueled HPD Highcroft Racing prototype driven by Brabham and Pagenaud captured their second MICHELIN GREEN X Challenge win of the season and the E85R-fueled No. 45 Flying Lizard Porsche of Joerg Bergmeister and Patrick Long also scored their second MICHELIN GREEN X GT win of the season.

The Galleries

Regis Lefebure Rick Dole John Thawley

Belgian Waffle

Editor — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 07:06:00 +0000

Ed Fahey ~ Click on image to view Ed Fahey’s full gallery from Spa.A couple of weeks ago, a great many people got inordinately excited about a tennis match in the preliminary stages of the Wimbledon championships that finished with just over 11 hours on the clock. Amidst all the breathless talk of ‘amazing’, ‘incredible’ and ‘unprecedented’, I decided to bite my lip and grin wryly in the knowledge that I’d already been to one 24-hour motor race this year, and would shortly be attending another. Whatever the location, driving a racing car has to be one of the most physically and psychologically exhausting ways of spending 24 hours of your life. But whereas Le Mans is all about the magical atmosphere and ambience, the Spa 24 Hours is all about the magical setting. Whisper it, but the Circuit de la Sarthe, with its long, flat-out straights and no real elevation changes, is not exactly the sternest test of pure driving skill.

One of the greatest gets his due.

Editor — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 06:30:34 +0000

Ford Racing ArchivesOver the years I’ve made no secret of the fact that I believe Dan Gurney to be one of the giants of American racing. As a matter of fact, if there was ever a Mount Rushmore-like edifice created that was devoted to the subject, Gurney would be there, along with just a very few others. My list would include Gurney, Jim Hall (responsible - along with a cadre of devoted GM enthusiast engineers - for some of the most influential innovations in racing history), Roger Penske (as legendary team owner and as a driver), Carroll Shelby (I’m not and will never be a fan of the ruthless, mercenary/huckster side of him, but there’s no denying the historical impact of the Shelby-American years on American racing), Mario Andretti (simply one of the greatest all-around drivers who ever lived), A.J. Foyt Jr. (the “who was better?” debate about A.J. and Mario will go on indefinitely) and Phil Hill, America’s first World Champion.