Pre Race notes – Fernandez, Autocon, Porsche GT2

Adrian Fernandez did confirm that as of now, the future plans for his team are unknown.

“We just don’t know what our plans are right now.  I want to stay in sportscars – the schedule and the driving fits me where I am now age wise.  I want to continue racing, but I’m too old for Indy Cars.  But as of now, we don’t know what Acura’s plans are and we don’t know what Lowe’s plans are either.  I don’t want to go back to NASCAR or Grand Am, so I guess we’ll see what we can work out.  I guess it’ll be Indy Cars or ALMS, whatever we can work out.  I think our team is better right now than a number of teams in Indy racing right now.  I know we can compete – we just need to get our future sorted out soon.”

As far as this year, he is obviously quite pleased with the way it has gone.  “I can’t ask for more.  We’ve had a great season so far and I hope it continues to work that way.  We’re up against a Dyson team that is coming on quite strong and we haven’t been doing any development, so it’s going to be tougher as we go farther into the season.”

“As far as the weight change, you can’t really feel any difference.  It’s worth about half a second here, but you can’t really feel anything different when you are driving the car.”

Autocon – Bryan Willman explained the weekend for Autocon – “We had a good test here on Tuesday.  Things went quite well, on Thursday, but on Friday, Tomy Drisi got caught out on cold tires and a slick track.  The resulting damage brought is a new wing and some unknown amount of added weight.  I’m sure it’s 13 tons or something like that.  Because we didn’t have another one of the new wings, the officials decided to let us run one of the old spec ones and give us some extra weight to balance it out.”

“We went quite well in qualifying, keeping ahead of the GT cars, so we’re pretty happy with that.  Warm up was interesting.  The track was really slick.  The dark spots were really bad – you could brake, swing the wheel to either side, or jam on the brakes – it just didn’t matter.  The car would just continue on it’s own merry way.  When I was out on track, Johnny Mowlem went past and Mike Lewis got on the radio and told me to follow him.  Duh, I replied.  I got a much better understanding for the wet line around this track after following him.  It’s a much wider line than I expected.”

“We’ll be at he rest of the races this season and are planning on a full season and hopefully Le Mans in 2010.”

Porsche GT2 Notes - According to Eric Ingraham of the Flying Lizards, the Porsches are running to the same spec as they did at Le Mans this year.  “We were at 1220 kg and now we are running at 1245.  There was no change in the restrictor size.”

As far as the performance, “the weight will likely affect us more at other tracks that are more abrasive than here.  We’ll see as the season goes on.

Wolf Henzler is racing with a recently revised Farnbacher-Loles team.  “We’d had some mistakes made that shouldn’t have been made, so the team made some changes on the crew.  It’ll take a few races to get us working together properly, but it’s been a tough year.  The ALMS program is my priority, so I only drive in the Grand Am events when there is no conflict, but in the ALMS races, I’ve had 4 different co-drivers so far.  It’s tough to get any continuity that way.”

“As far as the 25kg of added weight, it isn’t all that noticeable.  Maybe it could be noticeable if I drove the cars back to back with the different weights, but by the seat of the pants, I can’t really tell any difference.”

Gary Horrocks