Texas Motor Speedway Leather Center 04/03/2001   Saturday Practice 1 Report   © Tom Kjos Fort Worth, Texas--It rained lightly throughout the first practice session of the American Le Mans Series season here at Texas Motor Speedway. High temperatures today in the 50's Fahrenheit are little more than half those seen at last year's outing in Texas. Given that contrast, drivers are more than happy to spend some time on rain tires. This season starts here on a road-course-in-an oval, and in North America ends on one, Charlotte. Whether road race fans think much of such venues or not, they are impressive in their sheer imposing size. Speedway PR tells us that this 154,861 seat facility serves "9,556 pounds of nacho chips dipped in 937 gallons of cheese sauce, and topped with 424 gallons of jalapenos" over a season. They don't tell us how many gallons of beer are consumed, but this is Texas--I hate to guess. This first race is one in which new and modified cars and drivers are looking for as much time as possible to learn and re-learn the intricacies of set-up, tires and other such minutia. In fact, one wet session will be fine, but a whole string of them can put the newest of teams behind where they want to be for Sebring in a scant two-week's time. A lean field of twenty-three cars in three classes appeared for the first session. One, the #49 Panoz Motor Sports LMP-1 Roadster S never left the pits, nor was any activity in evidence of work in progress. The work occurred yesterday and last night after damage in yesterday's testing was extensive enough to use up all the "spare bits and pieces" the team brought for the car. With little seat time behind them, Jay Cochran and Richard Dean have agreed that discretion is the better part of valor and parked it for the rain-soaked first session. A major story at this opener will of course be the performance of the new Panoz LMP07. If the LMP-1 represented a break from traditional prototypes similar to the departure from realism of impressionists like Monet and Renoir, then the LMP07 completes the trip to abstractionism in sports cars, much as Picasso did in art. Seen "in the flesh" the Panoz is nothing less than deserving of comparison to great art. Early in the session, the new Panoz lagged the Audis by some 15 seconds, turning times in the 1:42 range to the Audi's 1:27s. That engendered some pit lane discussion, but it seemed unlikely the difference was any more than a result of continuing familiarization with the new batmobile. In fact, at the end of the session, Magnussen and Brabham had the white car only two-tenths back of the pace-setting Biela / Pirro Audi. The rest of the five prototypes that took to the track for this session lined up behind, comprising the second AudiSport NA car of Capello / Kristensen, the Panoz LMP-1 of Graf / Salles, and the hand-me-down Champion Audi of Andy Wallace and Dorsey Schroeder, a full five seconds adrift. The works Corvettes likewise sat out this morning's session, and the GTS class Vipers of American Viper Racing found themselves buried well down the GT order, the best of them at 1:38, behind eight GT entries. Reserving any real conclusions of course, given the rain, BMW has gotten itself mixed nicely in amongst the Porsche GT-3RS machines, with JJ Lehto and Jorg Muller just five hundredths of a second back of Kelly-Moss class pace-setting car of Bouchut and Lazzaro. No one is here yet that I could find aside from the teams, officials and media wonks. Weather certainly doesn't help. Press coverage and promotion has been quite good these past few days in this hotbed of NASCAR racing. We hope for a better crowd--and better weather--tomorrow. Copyright ©2000-©2023 TotalMotorSport