ALMS, Mosport - Race Report
Muscle Milk Domination The track action at Mosport on Sunday was as hot as the temperatures being recorded up and down the pit lane this weekend, but it took the race’s only full course caution period 36 minutes into the race to shake things up. Until that time, there was precious little of interest to focus on in either the big boys’ P1 or big guns’ GT class. Klaus Graf and Lucas Luhr in their Muscle Milk Lola-Aston Martin took an easy second ALMS victory, 28 seconds ahead of Chris Dyson and Guy Smith’s #16 Dyson Lola-Mazda. They only lost the lead for 28 of the 129 laps in the race, and were rarely troubled. Had it not been for a miscue in the timing of their first pit stop, by which point they had a 50-second lead, it’s likely they would have had a flag-to-flag victory. The team was insistent that the call to open the pits had come too late for it to bring the #6 in at the same time as the other frontrunners, leaving it among the LMPC cars for a further ten minutes.  Luhr, who is on a winning-roll after his most recent GT1 World Championship weekend, explained how they made up the deficit. “After the stop we said, ‘OK, we have the speed; just do your job’, and that’s what we did. If you have a 50-second lead and you’re only 25 seconds down, it’s a big deal. Things go wrong so easily. It’s Mosport - you're so quick here, and there isn't a lot of run-off space. Things can go wrong, and the next thing you know you're in the barrier. You have to make up the time at the right spot; it takes a lot to get back to the front."
Luhr quickly tracked down the Lola-Mazda, which had been down on power all weekend and struggling with niggling issues, and retook the lead with a Turn 1 pass around the half way mark. The sister Lola-Mazda of Humaid Al Masaood and Steven Kane was third after a solid run. "We certainly found a good setup and have good memories from last year," said Graf, who drove a Porsche RS Spyder in 2010 with Romain Dumas. "We did some testing with the Aston Martin this year to find a good aero balance and get the car to where it is now. It showed today. We certainly didn`t make it easy, but Lucas did a good job at the beginning and then he pushed once we lost the lead. At the end of the day it comes down to experience from both drivers and our team. We’ve both won here and we like the track; it’s nice to finish the weekend with a win." It was the battle behind the prototypes in GT (and GTC) which really set this race alight. Corvette Racing’s Oliver Gavin and Jan Magnussen broke BMW RLL’s stranglehold on the top step of the podium by claiming their first series win of the year. There was a scant four seconds between the winners and the second place finishers, Jaime Melo and Toni Vilander, taking the Risi Ferrari to its best finish of the season so far. “As the race hotted up after the caution, we started coming up on these big clumps of traffic and things started getting crazy," said Olly Gavin. "I had this mad battle with Toni, where the Ferrari passed me going into Turn 2 and then he went around the outside of a GTC car. I managed to undercut them both and come back around the outside into Turn 3 – it was fantastic racing! “Hats off to Jan, who did the last hour, and the team who did a stellar job today,” he continued. “I knew from my stint that if Jan was on the Ferrari gearbox coming out of Turn 5, you could probably get a tow coming out and use the momentum to get by. He executed brilliantly and then sliced through traffic to get a four or five second lead.” "We were pushing as hard as we could the whole race, same as the Ferrari," recalled Magnussen, who helped give Corvette its first GT victory in 2009 at Mosport, also just in front of the Risi Ferrari. "It’s a really fast car; I had to wait a while for Melo to make a mistake. He finally made one in traffic and I was able to take advantage. I knew I couldn’t pull away from him on speed, so I had to take some chances in traffic to keep ahead of him. "This race had a bunch of different potential winners at different stages," he added. "I think BMW looked like they had the advantage, but we were able to push at the right moments and pull a win out. If you asked us this morning, we’d have said there will only be one winner. I’m glad we were the ones that got to break the BMW win barrier." Bill Auberlen and Dirk Werner finished third but, to be honest, Mosport is probably a race that BMW might choose to forget. The Muller/Hand car led the race up until the full course caution, but the American ended up serving a penalty for avoidable contact after making an over-optimistic exit from the pits, smack into the Risi Ferrari’s door. The Auberlen/Werner car then claimed what should have been an unassailable lead until they too got a stop/go penalty for driving into the GTC class leader, Spencer Pumpelly in the #66 TRG Porsche GT3. The penalty box was one of the busiest areas of the pit lane on Sunday... Hand’s penalty promoted Jörg Bergmeister in the #45 Flying Lizard Porsche into the lead for thirteen laps. The lanky German had got a jump on the #55 BMW at the green flag and last year’s GT winners were hoping to get a much needed win under their belts. Bergmeister got a bit up close and personal with an early-braking prototype, however, and ended up spinning back to fifth in class, but that was the least of their worries. A power steering problem at the one hour mark saw them lose eight laps and a potential podium result slip away. Others to have suffered either at the hands of mechanical gremlins, unwarranted contact or the dreaded penalty box were the #99 Jaguar RSR – which to the surprise of the entire paddock posted the fastest GT race lap in the hands of Bruno Junqueira – the Extreme Speed Ferraris, the Falken Porsche and the Paul Miller Racing Porsche. Mention should be given to the Ford GT of David and Andrea Robertson as it was rumoured to be David’s last race of the season. A test is taking place this week for a potential replacement...maybe an all female driving crew for the first time in ALMS history? The very distinctive #50 Panoz Abruzzi had a consistent and trouble-free run to 17th (albeit unclassified, due to its non-homologated status) in the hands of Ian James and Edward Sandström. It remains to be seen if the car will race again in the series this season. As for the one-make classes, there was incident and action aplenty in both. In LMPC, CORE Autosport took a one-two as Ricardo Gonzalez and Gunnar Jeannette led teammates Jon Bennett and Frankie Montecalvo home in their twin ORECA FLM09s. Lime Rock Park winner Genoa Racing was third with drivers Eric Lux and Christian Zugel. But it could have so easily been a different story. The #06 Jeannette/Gonzalez car ran faultlessly from start to finish and their place at the head of the class was never challenged. Jon Field, in only his second LMPC start and this time driving with Ricardo Vera, had a dreadful day. He was involved in a tangle with the JDX Racing GTC car of Chris Cumming – which also took out LMPC pole sitter and local favourite Kyle Marcelli in the sister Intersport entry – got two penalties and then ran out of fuel at the end of the race instead of taking second in class. The No.18 Nicolosi/Boon entry also ran out of fuel with two minutes to go, denying Performance Tech Motorsports third place. “Racing in the series is about being smart right now,” said Gunnar. “There are so many classes and different closing speeds, especially at a place like this. You can come up on a GTC and they don't see you there as well. We had the Michelin in-car camera going and we watched it in the pits. A couple of times I wanted to turn it off, I don't think I have any nails left right now!”
And so, finally, to GTC but it’s almost unkind they should be classified as ‘finally’. The GTC race mirrored that of its GT brethren with multiple lead changes, and Spencer Pumpelly delivered a grandstand finish with a last-lap pass on TRG teammate Dion von Moltke. "My job was to get a good lead for Spencer," Pumpelly’s co-driver Duncan Ende said. "Spencer had a rough day, but I knew if anyone could get us back in the race it was him. He had to dance with the flat spots [on the tyres] but did a great job." It was sweet revenge for Pumpelly and Ende in their TRG Porsche 911 GT3 Cup. Not only did the pair just miss out on a win at Lime Rock Park - the result of a last lap pass by von Moltke on Pumpelly - but the latter was also spun from the GTC lead earlier in the race. "This might be the only race I’ve won twice," he said. "We passed the Black Swan Racing car and then the Alex Job Racing car again. Next thing I knew I was going backward. Then I got to watch the GTC race for the lead while sitting backward. But I got back in the pits and the car was 100 percent after that. Even with some small flat spots, the TRG team put together a great car.”  |
So that was Mosport for another year. When next visited, there will be a new look to the track as the new owner consortium, including one Ron Fellows, is starting in October on a raft of changes and updates. The existing race control tower/media room, which was built in the sixties, will be demolished and a new building will be erected on the opposite side of the track to the existing one. It will include race control, timing and scoring, media and hospitality facilities and, in the view of many, not before time. It’s hoped that the building will include sufficient bandwidth internet to satisfy the international press and photographers, and air conditioning. While temperatures were unseasonably high this past weekend, one fan circulating doesn’t do much to cool things down. Photographers don’t, as a rule, garner much sympathy from journalists but you had to feel for them as they returned from shooting trackside and peeled off cameras, lenses, photo vests and other supplementary equipment. They looked as though they’d stood under a water hose. All together now...aaah. Fiona Miller | 
