A look back at ALMS Utah Grand Prix
Written by Scott Keller · May 25, 2008
The American Le Mans Series finally returned from a long break, moving from the streets of Long Beach to the huge road course at Miller Motorsports Park in Utah. I finally got a break in my schedule to finally fire up the TiVo and get a look at the action.
The biggest news on the front end of this race is the return of Gil de Ferran to major American motor racing. The soft-spoken Brazilian and his French-phenom-co-driver, Simon Pagenaud, brought their brand new Acura LMP2 prototype out for the first time, and did a spectacular job.
Speed’s coverage started with the usual fanfare and it was great to hear Calvin Fish again, being a former Champ Car fan. However, Speed might want to reconsider how they introduce the starting field. They allow the top drivers in each class to announce themselves, and the foreign accents and strange eye glances made my wife laugh. She chuckled and mocked their accents and even asked of Wolf Henzler, “Is that guy cross-eyed?”. Hmm, they might just want to let the booth team announce the starters.
The big question going into the start of the race is, “What the heck is wrong with Audi?” Miller Motorsports Park has huge straights, and should have suited the powerful Audi’s nicely. But as the green flag dropped on the race, the Audis, starting fairly deep in the field, roared to the front, taking advantage of the P1 power. But much to my surprose, John Field also took his P1 Lola to the front and split the Audis. And Field drove like a man-possessed, dogging and dicing with the Audis for quite a while, even taking the lead. Ze’ German’s ver not happy aboud ze’ crazy American running up front.
But the Audi boys had bigger problems. The P2 Porsches were knocking on the door, and with Field driving over his head and creating havoc, the action at the front was intense in the first 30 minutes. And things got even crazier as the field of prototypes came around to laps the GT cars for the first time, and John Field finally lost it, spinning while trying to make a move around a slower car.
It all settled down as the yellow came out with just over 2:25 to go. The Audi guys pitted together, taking tires and fuel, as did the Sascha Maassen driven Penske Porsche. The full-course yellow seemed to drag on forever, perhaps a result of a 4-mile road course to go around and around. I fell asleep during the caution, and had to rewind the TiVo. Zzzzzz…
The field came back to life with 2:19 to go, Scott Sharp got into turn one a little too hot, spun, and collected Christian Fittipaldi. Fittipaldi’s Acura got new tires and seemed to be OK, but Sharp’s car suffered terrible suspension damage. Another yellow…………..Zzzzzzzz….
Luis Diaz emerged out of the fracas with the lead with 2:07 to go. And on the restart, John Field is again dogging one of the Audis. You have to admire his bravery, and enjoy watching him piss off the Germans by breaking late and missing his apex only to get passed on the exit. While it’s not pretty, it is entertaining.
At the two hour mark, the race settled down and got pretty boring. The GT2 cars were dicing pretty hard, though. Henzler, Farnbacher, Milner, and Curran and Murry were the top 5 in GT2. Farnbacher, of course, was putting in a good early run for Taffel, the hottest new team in GT2.
In P2, the running order was Diaz, de Ferran, Bernhard, Devlin, and Maaseen, with Ben Devlin.
With 90 minutes to go, the driver changes were imminent. The most noteable driver change was higlighted by Gil de Ferran who referred to his young co-driver, Simon Pagenaudt as “unleashing their secret weapon”. You’ve got to love Gil. And by the way, that Panasonic Acura has a sweet-looking black livery that just looks fast.
The #2 Audi opted for a driver change with 75 minutes to, and Lucas Luhr had a major problem exiting the pits. Calvin Fish commented that the Audi probably suffered an electronic glitch that caused a very slow exit. A lap later, the #1 Audi pitted, giving the overall lead to Penkse’s Timo Bernhardt.
The Penske guys still had to pit again, but something was looming for Audi. With an hour to go, a report came in that the Audi R10’s were going to be short on fuel unless they got a long yellow. The writing was on the wall that Penske’s strategy was once again coming together. With 1:01 to go, Bernhardt pitted, giving the lead to Emanuele Pirro in the #1 Audi.
But the handwriting was on the wall, Roger Penske played it cool on TV, but he knows that things are going his way. The R10’s are going to have to come in for a splash of diesel, and his Spyders are going to take another overall win.
Audi felt the pinch and decided to split their strategy. They brought in Pirro for an early splash with 50 minutes to go with the idea of letting him unleash the Audio and track down the leaders. Their plan with the #2 car was to keep Luhr out as long as possible to try to catch a yellow.
Getting back to GT2, the woes for the Mika Salo/Jamie Melo Ferrari continued. Melo tangled with a Corvette with about 45 minutes to go, and the American iron fared better in the collision. The Vette continued, while the Ferrari was done for the day.
A few minutes later, another team was done for the day, and that team was the #1 Audi driven by Emanuele Pirro. Pirro was trying to get around the rolling chicane Ford GT and got caught out with nowhere to go.
That was the last interesting moment of the race as the fuel strategies played, SPEED played a ton of commercials (Zzzzzz…) out and Penske won again.
A couple things are clear after this race. First, SpeedTV ran a crawl of the standings in each class, which is great. However, they didn’t do a good job of keeping fans up to speed on the overall race. With two classes (LMP1 and LMGT1) having totally meaningless amounts of cars, the overall win in the two prototypes class and the win in GT2 are the only stories that ALMS has to offer. At many points in the race I wondered who the overall leader was. They should include a crawl for the top five in overall standings as far as I’m concerned.
Secondly, the LMP1 cars are hamstrung so bad, I wouldn’t be suprised to see Audi forsake ALMS next year. It will be just in time for Corvette team to run their planned LMP1 entry in a class by themselves, which is a familiar place for them.
This race had some good moments, but overall was relatively boring. My wife glanced up from her masters studies only twice in the last 90 minutes of the race. Once was during an advertisement featuring drifting cars (she loves those), and the other was to ask, “I though this was American Le Mans, so why are all the drivers foreign?” Good question.
I’m going to switch over to the Nationwide race at Charlotte now so she can get her fix of ‘Mericun drivers.
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