AMERICAN LE MANS ENDURANCE SERIES

RELIABILITY RETURNS FOR TIM

After failing to finish his last two races, at Brno in the FIA GT series and at Monza in the Le Mans Endurance Series Tim Sugden was pleased to finish the 2 hour 45 minute American Le Mans Series (ALMS) race on Sunday at the Sonoma Raceway in California.  The cars used by Tim in each of the three series are different examples of the Porsche GT3 RSR and the J3 Racing car is perhaps the least developed version available to him this year but has so far been completely reliable.

Practice for the 5th round of the series was very close indeed with 9 cars within one second of each other and Tim had to settle for 8th on the grid despite putting 5 successive laps in at faster speeds as his times improved.    As usual Tims team mate Justin Jackson started the race and had a slight accident on the second lap that caused the team to call the car in during a very early yellow flag pace car period to change a damaged wheel and top up the fuel.

Normal strategy for the team plans a driver change either in a pace car period after Justin’s minimum 45 minute stint or at the first refuelling stop.   On this occasion there were no further pace car periods and as the car had extra fuel the driver change ran to 1 hour 25 minutes into the race but the earlier delay meant the car ran 8th in class.    Tim was then faced with less that 1 hour 20 to improve the result and despite a run of consistent quick laps within just over a second of the fastest in GT2, 6th place at the end was the best he could do.

This result maintains his 4 the place in the ALMS championship with J3 Racing also now placed 4th in the team list.   However his standing will almost certainly fall as his busy schedule means that he must now miss the next round of this series due to a clashing entry in the Spa 24 hour race in Belgium in two weeks time, a round of the FIA championship.    This is his next race and he is hoping that the reliability of his GruppeM Porsche returns for that event.