ALMS – Petit Le Mans - Race Round Up
Not A Classic Classic
But Still Much To Admire In A Furious Race
© Tom Kjos

Gainesville, Georgia, USA – A team won a championship and became a champion yesterday, October 1. The team we’re talking about is the one that includes drivers Frank Biela and Emanuele Pirro, the new one responsible for campaigning the #2 Audi R8 for Champion Racing of Pompano Beach, Florida. “Frank and I came from a rather disappointing touring car championship,” said Pirro. “We didn’t look strong as a driver pairing the first couple of races. And now we have the entire championship. We started with a crew – from Speed World Challenge – that was motivated, but with little experience in sports car racing. They became so good that they are now setting the standard. I am so proud and happy to be sharing this car with an old champ like Frank.” And clearly, both of you are proud and happy to be sharing this championship with a bunch of extraordinary guys and gals from Florida.

We posted plenty of detail during the event, so let’s continue with a simple summary of the highs and lows.

After another rocky start, Dyson Racing made it a good chase, Chris Dyson and Guy Smith running on pace hour after hour and keeping Pirro and Biela within the ten laps they lost early to a problematic turbo waste gate – which returned to plague them in the last hour, dropping the #20 Dyson Racing Lola B01/60 back to a twelve lap deficit at the finish. Readers of this site are savvy enough to understand that gap isn’t unusual – or insurmountable – in an endurance race of this length. You can check that out with JJ Lehto, who has no difficulty remembering the 1999 edition of this very race.

And what of the first corner incident that launched this race into controversy? At the time, it deflated everyone; teams, drivers, fans, media. Oh, no! There goes the race! They were booing in the turn 10 amphitheater, we are told. But as the day went on, our focus shifted to the steady work of Emanuele and Frank up front, and of Chris and Guy a few laps back, doggedly hanging on. We all saw the three ALMS position lights lit on Autocon’s Riley & Scott Mark IIIC. Go Bryan! Go Bryan! But once again an Audi R8 came back from the dead. JJ Lehto and Marco Werner, their sweep of 2005’s “Big Three” sports car races lost, finished on the podium, under the circumstances a surprisingly close twenty-two laps behind their teammates. Willman, Lewis and company kept on racing and scored a fourth in LMP1. Our take on that turn one incident is that we’re not driving, we don’t know. Both Weaver and Lehto said that Shimoda backed out of the throttle – or braked – very early into the turn. In Weaver’s case, he had expected a “fall into line” entry, and only went inside as Shimoda slowed. Lehto has a similar view. Are they wrong? Was Lehto too aggressive? Did he “chop” the Zytek? Did Weaver drift out on the pole winner? I don’t know, and besides, most of you will make up your own mind. Someone actually posted in a forum his certainty that the Audis “were out to get” the Zytek. There ought to be a law. No one in my experience has ever intentionally ended his race on the first lap. And everyone I know is quite aware that messing around with turn one at Road Atlanta is likely to do just that. Call it a racing incident and move on. The race did, and became a pretty good one.

LMP2 was no contest. Even an engine mapping problem with the Intersport Lola B05/40, leading to coil and plug replacement on the AER, didn’t cause any particular concern that it might get away. Liz drove competently and competitively, Jon drove very fast, and Clint gave us an impressive, worthy-of-a-champion performance. The rest of the field didn’t have a chance. It turns out they’ll have to finish their laps at Laguna to wrap it up. After six wins – and no championship – last year, and five so far this year, Clint should take the driver’s trophy home, or they need to just get rid of the whole idea of awarding one. B-K Motorsports kept themselves going – and mathematically in the hunt for the driver’s championship – by dumping prodigious amounts of oil into the Mazda Wankel. That was one contribution that old warhorse Elliott Forbes-Robinson could make, the perspective of experience. He wasn’t worried at all. “I’ve done that before,” he said. “Just keep dumping in oil; that’s the ticket.” As for the others, eight entered, one departed before the start, and four retired before race end. Unfortunately, that’s pretty routine for the class, and a European infusion didn’t have much impact on it. It seems certain that Penske and Porsche will join this field at Laguna Seca. Will they become, with Intersport, another competitive entry, or will they “catch the disease”?

Oliver Gavin was nervously pacing in the pits in the last hour. Olivier Beretta was in the car, running laps to the team’s specification to conserve fuel and keep the surviving Aston Martin – and their own teammates, of course – at bay. Once again, they did it flawlessly, convincingly beating the British cars and building a fifteen point cushion in the championship, over teammates Ron Fellows and Johnny O’Connell to take into the last outing at Laguna Seca.

The Aston Martins met one significant problem, on #58, and the rebuilt #57 lost a lap, in that way that we’re used to – the leader coming between the class challengers. John Hindhaugh struggled to get his head round the order on the track, and how it compared to the race order, but until the #58’s driveshaft problem, the top four were within a lap. There was some defensive driving from each team at appropriate times, and the track ‘came to’ the DBR9s as it cooled – but by then the #4 Corvette was as secure as a one lap lead can ever be. #3 had its first mechanical problem since that brake disc at Sebring. Has a class battle ever been more intense than over the 34 hours of Le Mans and Atlanta?

Tomas Enge had the clash with JJ Lehto – had recent frustrations go to the Finn? He seemed to be gesticulating at others rather frequently – but the Aston Martin proved its strength by surviving, while the R8 lost out with an amazingly quick repair. Without that contact and delay, the 22 lap deficit to the race winner could have been less than 20. Given the incident that's quite remarkable. In any other era, probably impossible. How this Audi, and the teams that have raced it, have turned the improbable into the ordinary.

The ACEMCO Saleen was ‘waved at’ by #1’s Finnish driver (Ralf Kelleners on his out lap), ‘kissed’ a couple of other cars, met some niggly issues (puncture, bodywork, penalties, power steering), but was driven as furiously fast as the other four, to a deserved third in GT1. The Maserati might have been in contention for the place, except that it struggled to reach the end of stints at fast enough speed, especially when only two tires were changed at a crucial point.

With chassis problems, Panoz (something of a nightmare) left this one to the Porsches, punctuating their slide since they won at this track in April. Alex Job Racing’s Timo Bernhard and Romain Dumas, who had fought back to take a lead in the championship after Portland, watched Patrick Long and Jörg Bergmeister and all the guys at Petersen Motorsports / White Lightning Racing win their third straight since then. AJR’s #23 car could only manage the fourth place that kept them mathematically in the running at Laguna Seca – after two contacts, and a repair. Lizards suffered a crash and a repair, so third for #45, while the BAM! Le Mans winner derived better than fifth. J3 overcame everything thrown at them for a distant sixth. AJR’s #24 had a great run (Collard / Tiemann / Baas), but Petersen-White Lightning is the team that has been building towards this level of proficiency for years.

Very early in this eighth edition of the Petit Le Mans the disappointment was palpable. The series that intends to be something else was doing a pretty good imitation of a sport that some have described as “racertainment.” But only three cars were lost to “incidents,” and there were only seven full course cautions, one for a grass fire near the track, amounting to thirty-eight laps of the nearly four hundred that the race covered. LMP2 accounted for four retirements, par for the course, perhaps even a bit better than we are used to, given the length of the race. We had our concerns, but in the end, Petit Le Mans delivered again. Part of the reason was the furious pace throughout (by their own admission, #2 excepted), but perhaps the expectations ahead of these races are now so great that the pressure will lead to contact such as we saw at Turn 1, Lap 1?

Who said this, of which team?

“I have never seen anyone so focused as a collective group in my life. I am really proud to be involved with this team the last three years and I’ll never forget this experience.”

A reference to Champion, Corvette Racing, Intersport or Petersen-White Lightning? It could apply to any of the class winners – perhaps to AJR, BAM!, the Lizards or ACEMCO too, from the regular ALMS teams. But it was actually spoken by Craig Stanton, back in the #31 Porsche, and on top of the world today. The final image is a 'what might have been' photograph.... STAR WARS indeed. But at Turn 1, Lap 1 guys?

To be a true classic, it needed an LMP1 race to remember, and we didn't get that. But the GT classes put on battles to remember, for a long time.