PK Sport At Sebring – Thursday Qualifying Report
“There’s two ways to do well in a race like this – you can drive at 100% for 12 hours and win it from the front, or you can run your own race pace and wait for it to come to you. We’ll be running the second kind!”

That was Robin Liddell’s outlook after a difficult day for PK Sport in practice and qualifying on Thursday, for the 12 Hours of Sebring.

Liddell’s morning practice run was curtailed very early on with the right rear Pirelli holed by a substantial piece of debris, on his first flying lap:

“I went into the first turn and thought “whoaa that doesn’t feel right” and then went into turn two and thought “whoaaaaaaaa – that REALLY doesn’t feel right.”

Robin very sensibly backed right off and brought the #60 Porsche 911 GT3-RS trundling back into the pitlane, with the tyre fully deflated.

“The tyre held together well, if it had let go when it went down it would have done enormous damage.”

As it was the PK Sport crew gave the car a brief check-over, installed a new Pirelli and sent Liddell on his way again.

The story for the #61 car was even more dramatic, with a broken driveshaft seeming to be a freak - if easily fixable – problem. “The shaft broke clean in half, a complete mystery,” said David Warnock. That problem though would fade into insignificance when the team suffered a second engine failure, just as Alex Caffi was leaving the team’s awning after the driveshaft was replaced.: “Unbelievable, we really don’t know yet what happened,” a clearly bewildered Caffi said later.

With available track time at a premium, it was doubly bad news for the team.

With several factory-backed Porsches in the field, keen to prove the pace of their hugely expensive 2004 cars, the afternoon qualifying session was always likely to be a dogfight, and so it proved.

Liddell’s earlier prediction on PK’s strategy proved absolutely correct, the #60 car posting a time of 2:07.563, and rounding out the top 10 in the enormously competitive class. But the #61 car missed the session.

There was some good news for the #61 squad post session however, because two of the top three in GT had their qualifying times disallowed for technical infringements: #61 would start ahead of the class favourites after all!

Thursday evening sees the one opportunity for teams to practice in darkness, an essential requirement for each and every driver, all of whom must complete three laps to ensure that they are well acquainted with the particular challenges of the fast, bumpy and very busy circuit at night.

But before the cars went out to practice, there was a big surprise for Alex Caffi: his Pirelli backers decided to celebrate his 40th birthday with a surprise party, Caffi successfully blowing out the candles in much the same fashion as he will be hoping to blow away the opposition in Saturday’s race. The quick Italian finished third in GT here last year (matching PK’s achievement in 2002). That's Pirelli's Peter Tyson looking on.

After all the trials and tribulations of the day, the cars now behaved perfectly in the darkness, all six drivers successfully completing the required laps - with Hugh Plumb and Peter Boss taking time out to practice the all-important driver change routines back in the team awning. This is David Warnock in #61, below.

Hugh Plumb fully realises the magnitude of the challenge that lies ahead: “This is a real race of attrition, a car killer. The wear on a car here in 12 Hours is very much like that which you’ll see over double that time on track at Daytona. Where we score over several other teams is that we have a driver squad of three guys who know how to get the job done, don’t make mistakes and can put in quick and consistent laps.”

Hugh’s other team-mate in #60, Peter Boss, is making his Sebring debut, but Boss is a man well used to the challenges of top class motorsport. An outing in an LMP900 Panoz in the European Le Mans Series was followed by two seasons of highly competitive Formula 3000 racing in Europe.

But the American Le Mans Series will be his focus for 2004, with a full season commitment to PK Sport.