TotalMotorSport All the latest Motorsport news, race reports and photographs from around the world. Alms, Touring Cars, Formula One & Le Mans 24 Hours

Portland International Raceway

05/08/2001

Event

Preview

The American Le Mans Series circus now moves on to Portland International Raceway. This is the second of four races in a mere five weeks, and Portland could not be any more different from Sears Point. We go from a "technical" track with no straight of significance, to a venue with perhaps little else. Portland has some "twisty bits' of course, most notable the Festival Curves that break up the drag strip front straight, but from a bird's-eye view Portland appears to be nothing other than a shorter Hockenheim--drive like hell, brake hard, and drive like hell again.

Nothing you can throw at Audi seems to much bother them since their struggles in a Nurburgring deluge over a year ago, and this weekend should be little different. Nothing breaks, they don't hit anything or get hit, and they drive very fast indeed. So there is no doubt they will continue to head up the prototype field, a small one this time. The Cadillacs appear to be sticking to the 2001 development program that did not include this round. Jon Field's Intersport Lola is off to contest a round of the Grand American Road Racing Association where the car has a clean shot at a win, the front pack there including nothing like the Audi R8. We do expect to see Intersport back at Mid Ohio, home track to this Buckeye team.

Champion has not appeared to hit its stride with its own R8, having been left at Sears Point in a losing battle for third place with the back-to-the-future Panoz LMP1. There is no driver combination clearly better than Wallace / Herbert in the sport today. A 2000 spec. car should be able to turn year 2000 times in the hands of these drivers, should it not? If it does, it should be able to mount a better challenge to the factory team than we saw at Sears Point.

As for Panoz, they should improve just by re-familiarization with their old racer. There will be no time for testing until the month before the team returns to its home track for the Petit Le Mans in October, but they got up to speed quickly at Sears and we expect they will make another small step this week. Here's to the hope the pack gets a little closer together this week. All five of them.

Rook KnightHawk comes back with its Nissan powered Lola to challenge the Barbour Reynard Judd in LMP 675. If this is the field that starts it will be more than twice as good that at Sears Point. Unfortunately, until Barbour is ready to field the second, professionally driven entry, we have little to see that is an indication of the real potential of the class. Launched with much hope as an "alternative" LMP, the 675 formula has provided little on-track excitement to date outside of Le Mans itself. It appears not to be different at Portland.

Ron Fellows promised "a talk" with GM racing in the two hours following the podium ceremony at Sears Point to get the team to Portland. He must have some powers of persuasion because by mid-week, he got Portland. I have to think there are a whole lot of GM executives that could take lessons from this guy. Ron may not be nominally in charge of the racing program, but we get the sense that he is its heart and soul. GM can use heart and soul wherever they can find it. That sets up Portland to be another very good GTS round. The way to take on a challenge--the Saleen S7R in this case--is to meet it head on, and that is exactly what Corvette is finally doing, much to the delight of racing fans. At Sears, this was a nose-to-tail shootout that came down to tires at just short of mid-race. That and a later problem for the S7R resulted in a misleading result by the end. This will be another head-to-head, and it has a fair chance of being that way all the way to the end. Portland is less of a handling track, so we think that swings the advantage toward the Saleen.

American Viperacing continued to push its way toward the big boys with the introduction of the Shane Lewis / Jeff Altenburg driver pairing at Sears Point. That left the Viper still about two and a half seconds adrift to the Pilgrim / Collins Corvette in qualifying and three laps at the finish. On pedigree, these cars should be able to develop into class challengers.

Our Sears Point Race Retrospective offered the opinion that BMW's M3 GTRs would easily win the remaining ALMS rounds, a view not shared by the editor. Portland will make a good test of Malcolm's more hopeful perspective. Portland is as suited to the strengths of the Porsche GT3-RS as was Sears Point to the M3 GTR. Its long high speed stretches play to the assumed high speed and aerodynamic advantages of the machines from Weissach. Even PTG driver Hans Stuck anticipates a much close fight. "We're not going to see such a big difference in time between the BMW and Porsche, because the high-speed sections are in favor for the Porsches, while the power and the handling sections favor the BMW. I think we're going to see a lot of close competition." We hope so, too, Hans.

The gap between factory-supported Porsches and customer Porsches was larger at Sears Point than that to the BMWs. True enough, for reasons that don't require any conspiracy theories. Only Alex Job Racing and Petersen Motorsports have the RS upgrade in this field, and only those two provide seats for top-of-the-sport professional drivers. That may not be all of the four seconds on the qualifying sheet, but it likely is most of it. That is why we said this was a seven-car race before Sears Point. It likewise is at Portland.

It was clear at Sears Point that there is little to choose between the two BMW teams. PTG matches the Schnitzer-BMW Motorsport operation driver-for-driver, wrench-for-wrench, and strategy-for-strategy. Tires are clearly an "x factor." Porsche friendly track or not, one of the GTRs is a likely winner. We have absolutely no idea which one.