Muscle Milk Pickett Racing cruised to another victory in the American Le Mans Series (ALMS) but it was the GT battle that caught the most attention as the series went down to Texas.
While the P1 battle was unremarkable, Klaus Graf and Lucas Luhr pulled out such a gap on Chris McMurray and Tony Burgess that they probably had the time to pull out a deck chair, read a magazine and still finish with a sizeable gap. One P1 that didn’t have the best of luck was the newly roofed Deltawing, it never had the speed at the Circuit of the Americas and eventually had to go behind the wall to fix an unknown problem and was classified 16 laps behind the leader.
The P2 battle was also unremarkable towards the end of the two hour 45 minute race, in the first hour Johannes van Overbeek stormed through the field to get to the lead of the pack, but through slower pit stops and hard charging Level 5 Motorsport machines meant the Extreme Speed Motorsport duo finished third and fourth. The winners of P2 were Scott Tucker and Ryan Briscoe, with Tucker’s other car in which he partnered Marino Franchitti and Guy Cosmo finishing a close second.
The strongest fight was, as usual, in the GT ranks – for a time it looked like Corvette Racing would have a strong 1-2 finish on the cards if luck played out their way, but luck is a cruel mistress and the #4 of Tommy Milner and Oliver Gavin soon discovered its dark side as the car experienced gearbox problems which escalated into retirement after the car got stuck in fourth gear.
With the BMWs blunted by the long straights of COTA and the Viper and Corvettes torque, it was an all american battle in the ALMS GT class as the #3 ‘Vette took on the might of the two SRT Vipers. The end result was a 20 minute duel between the #93 of Jonathan Bomarito and the #3 of Antonio Garcia to see who could claim the victory, Garcia was the eventual winner by only 0.854 seconds as the cars crossed the line.
Into PC and it was a breakthrough victory for BAR1 Motorsports as Kyle Marcelli and Chris Cumming held off competition from Mike Guasch and Dane Cameron in the PR1/Mathiasen Motorsports Oreca FLM09 who couldn’t retake the lead after the BAR1 car got past them on the start. Third place was the Core Autosport car with Jon Bennett and Tom Kimber-Smith on board, however in the post race checks it was found that there was an illegal modification on the car and had their points docked but retain their third place in the record books.
Finally GTC, and Irish ace Damien Faulkner took TRGs first win of the season following a true Anglo-Irish battle with Sean Edwards in the #30 MOMO 911 GT3 Cup. Unfortunately, the two collided in the heat of the fight and the end result was a slow puncture for Edwards and clear sailing for Faulkner. Another team that seemed to have the rub of the green was Dempsey Del Piero Racing, the pairing of Patrick Dempsey and Andy Lally claimed a podium finish.
The penultimate round of the final ALMS season is at Virginia International Raceway on October 5th.
