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Sebring

Exxon Superflo

17/03/2001

Thursday

Qualifying 2

© Janos Wimpffen

A quick look at Second Qualifying – more later.

Final qualifying, with the ‘production’ cars out first. The weather has been mixed thus far; partly cloudy, warm, humid, and rather breezy. There were sprinkles yesterday morning, with possible heavier rain tomorrow. But Friday is set aside for the support events, with only a free practice period for the ALMS entrants.

The American Viperacing team has been having a troubled meeting. Yesterday the no. 44 car went off and ingested a fair amount of dirt. Five minutes after the start of this session, the other team car stopped on course at Turn 7.

We had a stoppage; it was the #43 BMW which lunched its race engine.
The waning moments of GTS / GT qualifying show the Saleen continuing to top the Corvettes, as they had in this morning's practice. Ron Fellows couldn’t match the Saleen’s Wednesday time, let alone the improvement that Oliver Gavin managed today.

The V-8 BMW ends up on top of the GT pile today, but it hasn’t matched the Job times of yesterday. Also improving is the Larbre entry. Happily doing well are the Callaway and the Trinkler Corvette, adding some inter-marque brightness to the class. Sitting out the session were the Job cars, content with their Wednesday times.

Leading the non-Audi class for the first time is the Field Lola-Judd, a tick ahead of the no. 50 Panoz--the second of the LMP 07s not going at all well. The new Riley & Scott is again a little slower in this session than this morning's, a pattern they've followed the past few days. If anyone cares, Biela is on top of the R8 quartet, with his Wednesday time. Only the Johansson Audi improved of the turbocharged Prototypes, but Field found 1.7 seconds to take fifth on the grid: sincere congratulations to the Intersport team....but what were the (limited number of) other Prototypes doing?

The Salles / Graf Panoz was still in brake trouble. "In the last 24 hours the guys have changed virtually everything on the brake system, but we still have to find the problem," Graf said. "It has cost Gualter and me a lot of track time, but we will be trying to put some more laps on the car tonight." A reference to night practice, obviously.

Claudia Huertgen had the sole 675 car virtually on top GTS pace. More on Friday morning, UK time.