Adelaide ALMS 31/12/2000   Saturday 3 Final Session   Track images from the www.americanlemans.com sitelink This should have been almost the last chance to get some laps in prior to the race, and therefore fairly uneventful….not for some. Brad Jones was out for the first time at 5.03. Quite a prospect for the senior Australian, debuting at this level, at this race. "I got the call this morning from my brother, but I didn’t believe him and hung up. He kept on calling and it took him and his wife 20 minutes to convince me. Here I sit, at 40, and I get my first opportunity to drive a ‘full house’ car. I was a bit apprehensive, but pretty excited. They have been telling me about braking, understeering, about driving the car, but the first thing I noticed on the track is how hard it is to pass cars… that is going to be a problem. This car is unbelievable to drive and has a lot of grip compared to anything else I have driven. The car feels good in the slow sections, but with more laps under my belt, we can improve in the faster sections. The car is very tight, with me being the largest of the three drivers. " The #30 Porsche hit a kerb hard and broke an oil line, but Klaus Graf then hit the wall with the new Panoz LMP07, ripping off the rear wing and causing a trail of oil smoke. "I don’t really know what happened. I didn’t see any caution flags or anything, but I think I got into some oil. The car spun around and hit the wall." Charlie Slater attributed his Friday accident to a loss of concentration: “I didn’t give the tyres enough time to warm up and on a street circuit, if you don’t give the car a chance then you’ll have to hit the brakes too hard and there is so much torque, you’ll hit the walls. The wall I hit on Turn 1 (yesterday) was made of carbon fibre with tyres behind them… the car went in very deep, but it wasn’t as bad as it looked." (Franz Konrad seen below, on Friday) The Chamberlain Viper exceeded the pit lane speed limit, driver unknown. The Dick Barbour #5 Porsche then smacked the wall hard at turn 6 and lost a wheel. It remained stuck on the course. Street circuits are tough if you stray off line. Two cars are now damaged, and the race is less than 24 hours away. David Brabham had earlier expressed the view that “as the race goes on and more rubber goes down, it will help us more than anyone else.” PROTOTYPE: #78 1:26.163 / #2 1:27.933 / #12 1:28.437 GTS: #91 1:37.633 / #92 1:38.033 / #37 1:39.259 GT: # 5 1:36.945 / #51 1:37.265 / #10 1:37.793 Copyright ©2000-©2023 TotalMotorSport