Spencer Pumpelly and Steven Bertheau managed to coax just enough fuel out of TRG’s No. 67 Sargent &Lundy Porsche 911 GT3 Cup to take the GT victory in a thrilling finish at the Canadian Tire 200 at Watkins Glen – the most recent round of the Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series.
Pumpelly led the final six circuits as the lead changed hands five times in the final hour, taking the checkered flag 2.12 seconds ahead of Taylor. Craig Stanton and John Potter took third in the No. 44 Magnus Racing Porsche 911 GT3 Cup.
Bill Lester and Jordan Taylor regained the lead in the production-based GT championship standings with a second place finish in the No. 88 Autohaus Motorsports Chevrolet Camaro. Andrew Davis and Leh Keen entered the race with a one-point lead, but finished seventh in the No. 59 Brumos Racing Porsche 911 GT3 Cup and are now seven points behind (272-265) as they had to stop late in the race for fuel while leading the event.
Revised Grand-Am GT Points
Jordan Taylor/Bill Lester (Camaro) 272
Leh Keen/Andrew Davis (Porsche) 265
Jonathan Bomarito/Sylvain Tremblay (Mazda) 257
Team Overcomes Obstacles to Win
Starting from the 18th position, the winning TRG Porsche GT3 Cup car piloted by Steve Bertheau and Spencer Pumpelly secured one of the Series’ most dramatic GT wins of the season. With a qualifying session cut short due to on-track incidents and limited practice time, the team battled several obstacles to claim victory in the fastest paced Grand-Am race of all time.
Bertheau, winnner at the Daytona 24 earlier this year, was only able to get one flyer in during qualifying but managed to put down one of his best laps of the weekend.
“We knew we had some work to do on this one,” said TRG team owner/CEO Kevin Buckler. “We didn’t qualify as well as we had wanted, and definitely had our hands full with an ill-handling 66 team car, so we managed the strategy to death and knew we had a real shot early on with 67. If there’s a group of guys who can overcome adversity and get the job done at the end of the day, it’s our guys, and I am really proud of them today,” said Buckler.
The team seized the opportunity of a caution early to get all of its pit stop duties out of the way for the No. 67. This strategy paid dividends in the end. Bertheau nailed his performance and handed the car off to Pumpelly, the seasoned veteran. Pumpelly put on an outstanding drive, moving into the lead in the last 10 minutes then masterfully saved fuel to bring it home to the checker for his third professional sportscar win in a row.
“Strategy, a great crew and a fantastic co-driver, that’s what makes you win,”said Bertheau. “Kevin and Greg [Jones] were managing our time and fuel strategy from the drop of the green.”
The race was a fuel mileage game for other competitors as well, and it worked out nearly to perfection for John Potter and Craig Stanton as the two drove the no. 44 Magnus Racing Porsche 911 GT3 Cup to a third place finish in the two-hour race.
Starting from ninth place in the twenty-two car GT field, Potter was called into the pits during an early full-course caution to take fuel. The race restarted with Potter in 12th position, and throughout the next hour he advanced the Magnus Racing Porsche up through the field to the second position. Just past the one hour mark, Potter turned the car over to Stanton, who came out of the pits in 11th place –but with enough fuel to make it to the checkered flag.
Withstanding pressure from the no. 70 Mazda of Jonathan Bomarito, Stanton would take the checkered flag in third place, taking the second Rolex Series podium of the season for Magnus Racing. At the line, Stanton was a scant 12 seconds behind the winning no. 67 TRG Porsche and 10 seconds behind the runner-up no. 88 Autohaus Camaro.
Daytona Prototype class
Porsche factory driver Joerg Bergmeister, who has a Rolex Grand-Am DP championship to his name (2006), the pole for the Rolex 24 At Daytona in his lone Rolex Series appearance this season, and a three-time winner of the Rolex 24 At Daytona, taking the overall victory with TRG in 2003 and taking GT honors for that team in 2002 and 2009, joined the Porsche Riley team entered by Starworks Racing with Enzo Potolicchio.
With the only six cylinder engine in the DP field, Bergmeister/Potolicco finished 11th overall, five laps down from the leaders after suffering various mechanical ills.
The Rolex Series will be in action next Saturday with the Montreal 200 at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve on August 20, Round 11 of the 2011 season. This will be the Rolex Series’fifth visit to the famed island circuit.
Late in the six hour race, a caution period gave Leh Keen enough time to stop for gas and still finish the final two laps of the Sahlen’s Six Hours of the Glen. This huge break allowed Davis and Leh Keen to secure a class victory for Brumos Racing. A first for the Jacksonville-based team in the Grand-Am Road Racing Series since it dropped its Daytona Prototype program to concentrate on a GT Class Porsche 911 GT3 Cup car. The last Brumos win at the Glen was in 2003, when David Donohue/Mike Bokowski/Scott Goodyear won the race in the DP Brumos Porsche Fabcar.
The famed No. 59 red, white and blue Porsche was trying to maintain the GT lead by stretching a tank of gas for the final 52 minutes. But just as the caution flag waved in the final six minutes, the fuel pressure light started flashing.
The second-place Chevrolet Camaro of Bill Lester, Jordan Taylor and Tommy Milner was two laps down, so Keen stopped for gas for the final two laps and still won by one lap.
“That was a lot of fun,”Keen said. “Brumos does it again. I love this place.”
The team didn’t tell Keen he had a two-lap lead when they ordered him to pit road. He then got the news he was a lap ahead.
“I knew that it was not going to make it on fuel without a stop,”Davis said. “That last 30 minutes was nerve-racking.”
The Brumos Porsche was seventh overall
Finishing ahead of the bigger, faster prototypes in the DP class and finishing first in GT against the other tube-frame, specially-built GT cars. The Porsche 911 GT3 Cup car is constructed on the same assembly line as its 911 street car relatives, and is based on the street car chassis.
“We won the race based on strategy, not on performance,”Haywood said, “but Porsche tends to out-do more powerful cars the long the race is.”
The win moved Keen and Davis to second place in the GT standings, just three points behind Lester and Jordan Taylor.
“The classic endurance races are the 24 Hour of Daytona, the 12 Hours of Sebring, LeMans and Watkins Glen,”Haywood said. “We started this new program off at Daytona pretty strong, but now we sort of got our act together. If we can keep the momentum going, I think we can give the guys a good chance to win the championship. We just keep chipping away.”
What exactly does $3 bucks buy you these days? Not a hell of a lot, that’s for sure. Depending on where you are in the country, it might put 3/4 of a gallon of gas in your Porsche. Or, you could get these fun little stickers. How about a Porsche Matchbox car? Anyway, you get the idea. $3 just doesn’t buy a hell of a lot.
It Does Now
Thanks to the Continental Tire Dream Giveaway (a fund raising event sponsored by WorldCause Foundation), for just $3 bucks (it drops to $1 per ticket if you buy 100 of them) you can buy a chance at winning both a 2011 Hurley Haywood Edition Porsche GT3 and a 2011 Porsche Cayenne S Hybrid. That’s right, if you have the winning ticket you win not just one Porsche, but both the GT3 and the Cayenne as well as a lesson on how to drive them properly from Hurley Haywood himself. In case you’re wondering, that’s about $220,000 in Porsches. Even better, they will pay 25% toward the taxes for you! That’s a total value of $275,000.
You drive carefully, you don’t mistakes and you win your class. At least that’s what happened to the #67 TRG Porsche driven by Andy Lally (three time winner), Spencer Pumpelly (two time winner), Porsche factory driver Wolf Henzler (two time winner) and NASCAR truck drivers Brendan Gaughan and Steve Bertheau (this was the first Rolex 24 for both NASCAR drives).
“We didn’t have a clutch for the last 17 hours and you can’t make any mistakes without a clutch, especially leaving the pits. If you spin out, you have to be towed back and lose three or four laps and you might as well pack it in at that point and go home. I suppose it was a learning process the first few times as everyone on the team had to shift with no clutch. Being disqualified from the pole position was disappointing because he wanted the team prestige of qualifying with that honor. But it lit a fire under me and I drive better angry,“ said Lally.
The #67 TRG Porsche was just one of five fielded by Kevin Buckler’s veteran team. In fact, TRG is one of only two teams to win the overall race (in 2003) with a car running in the GT class and this win gives them their fourth class victory.
Following close on TRG’s heals for second place on the GT podium, but still two laps back, is the #48 Paul Miller Racing Porsche 911 GT3 Cup, driven by Bryan Sellers, Rob Bell, Bryce Miller and Tim Sugden. Paul, a Porsche dealer from NJ, has a history with Daytona. As a driver himself, he raced here in the ’80s and his son Bryce is familiar to Porsche fans for his time driving with Dirk Werner for most of the 2007 Grand-Am season, where they won six Rolex Grand-Am GT races leading Werner to the GT championship.
“The biggest challenge we faced was to perform as well as the car. Our crew is top notch and that they put together an amazing vehicle, so the drivers had to live up to their efforts on the track,“ said Bryce Miller.
Rounding out the podium in third place is Patrick Dempsey, Joe Foster, Charles Espenlaub and Tom Long. Today’s race , gives the Dempsey Racing’s No. 40 Mazda RX-8 its first Rolex Series podium.
“It was pretty emotional,” said Dempsey, who joined his teammates in scoring their best Rolex Series finish. The team led 197 laps with Dempsey out front for 28 of them. “To be on the wall and hear everybody’s journey with each stint was an incredibly joyous, magic, fun moment. It’s validation for all of their hard work, and this is a team sport.”
Overall the 2011 Was a Very Good Race for Porsche
“Winning the Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona is always a great accomplishment, but the effort of our customer teams to achieve a victory as well as four of the top five GT positions speaks to their level of preparation for this challenging event. Congratulations to TRG, Paul Miller Racing, Magnus Racing, and Brumos Racing for their top five finishes with their Porsche 911 GT3 Cup car. And we are proud of our factory drivers – Wolf Henzler, Marc Lieb, Richard Lietz, and Marco Holzer – who helped these teams to their result. And for the Flying Lizard Motorsports Porsche Riley squad, they had the fastest car, put it on the pole, turned the fastest lap of the race, and would have been there at the end if not for some back luck – Patrick Long, Joerg Bergmeister, Seth Neiman and Johannes van Overbeek showed what our Porsche 911-based engine can do in a Daytona Prototype,” said Jens Walther, president of Porsche Motorsport North America.
Bad Luck Plagues the Flying Lizard Team
Despite having the fastest car, turning the fastest laps of the race and Joerg Bergmeister putting the # 45 Daytona Prototype on pole, the Flying Lizard team had to bow out of the race with less than two hours to go after a series of unfortunate circumstances led to a race ending oil fire.
“At the end of his final stint, Joerg lost drive, and there was a small fire in the engine bay. He’s fine, but the car was done. We don’t really know what happened yet, but at this point it seems likely that there was more damage than we realized from the incidents early in the race. The entire team did a fantastic job this weekend – from preparing the car to qualifying on the pole to running an extremely hard, consistent race,” said team principal Seth Neiman.
The circumstances referred to by Neiman aboveincluded being hit in the rear, an unavoidable off-track excursion to avoid what could have been devastating contact, an untimely flat tire in the seventh hour, an extended pit-stop for a brake bleed and ultimately the fire that ended their race. Remarkably, according to Porsche, the engine is in perfect shape and could have continued the race had the fire not caused other severe damage.
The best placed Porsche in the DP (and overall) classification finished third with Joao Barbosa (Portugal), Christian Fittipaldi (Brazil), Max Papis (Italy), Terry Borcheller and JC France acting as pilots. The power-unit of the Porsche Riley fielded by Action Express Racing was a privately-developed eight-cylinder engine based on the Porsche Cayenne. Their sister car, which had led on and off over the distance, finished the race in ninth place.
Hurley Haywoods Return to Racing
For Hurley Haywood fans, Brumos Racing and the #59 Porsche 911 GT3 Cup didn’t disappoint. While a podium finish is always better, fifth in this field is a very good finish. Not only did the Brumos’ Porsche hold first a number of times during the race, they would have been a top three finisher had it not been for a broken radiator during the night.
One of the first things that attracted us to sports car racing (besides the cars of-course) was the sound. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, how can you not like a sport that you can hear well before you can see it. The cacophony of sounds you experience at a road racing event like Rolex 24 must be experienced to appreciate. However, we understand that not all of you live near enough a track and just might not have the opportunity to visit one. With you in mind we made this brief recording.
As you listen, see if you can distinguish between the deeper baritones of the DP cars and the higher pitched GT cars. You might actually want to turn your speakers down a bit as the sound can easily overwhelm them.
While this is a close approximation, nothing beats hearing it in person.
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If the player above doesn’t appear for you, use the instructions and the link below.
The Porsches and other race cars in this recording are so loud you can actually hear them overwhelm our microphone at times. If you’re having any difficulty using our player above (or you can’t see it in your browser/email) either click on the title of this post (if you’re viewing via email) or simply click on the link above to open the recording on your own computer (if the playback is choppy, simply right click the link and save the file to your own machine – it’s an MP3 file). You can then open it in the player of your choice.
More Daytona Goodness to Follow
Over the next few days we’ll be processing our pictures and experiences from this year’s Rolex 24 at Daytona. Be sure to check our Facebook page and Twitter profile for updates and images we may not necessarily post here on PorschePurist
A little over three hours into the 2011 Rolex 24 at Daytona International Speedway Porsche is giving their fans a great show. However, with more than 20 + hours remaining it’s a little too early to get excited or make predictions. Regardless, Porsche is far and away the dominant manufacturer in this race (with 15 race cars entered between the DP and GT Class).
As many of you know, Hurley Haywood came out of retirement to compete here at Daytona. To commemorate Hurley’s return, and provide a view into Porsche’s history at the Speedway, PCNA released this video a short time ago. Enjoy! Remember, if you’re seeing this post in your email you may need to click on the title above to view the video on our site!
Facts and Figures about Hurley Haywood
62 years-old
37 Rolex 24 at Daytona events
Five Rolex 24 overall wins plus a class win (the most overall wins of any racer)
18,800 laps completed, more than 67,550 miles of racing, more than two-and-a-half times around the globe
Number of sets of tires used (estimated with DNFs, rain/fog, etc.): 1,100 provided by Goodyear, Dunlop, Pirelli, Continental, and Hoosier – just slightly fewer than Continental is bringing for the entire field for the 2011 event
Facts about the Porsche 911-based race cars at the Rolex 24
Porsche 911-based race car wins: 38 Overall and Class Victories
First Porsche 911 Overall win: 1973 Porsche 911 Carrera RSR – Haywood/Gregg
Rolex 24 Porsche 911 overall and class-winning models: Porsche 911 Carrera RSR, Porsche 935, Porsche 911 GT3 R, Porsche 911 GT3 RS, Porsche 911 GT3 Cup
Four of Haywood’s five overall wins were accomplished in Porsche 911-based race cars
P1 in a 24 hour race doesn’t meant too much with regard to race results. There’s just way too much that can happen over the course of the race. However, it does provide additional confidence in car, driver and team when you break the qualifying record lap.
With a time of 1:40.099 (128.033 mph) Porsche factory driver Joerg Bergmeister surprised himself when he went out for a last lap and broke the record set two years prior by David Donohue.
“I was ready to come in, and the team told me to try again,” Bergmeister said. “I went for it. I risked everything, and it worked out perfectly. I knew we have a great car and a great engine, but I was really surprised to win the pole – with the team running the DP for the first time. I was hoping to qualify in the top five.”
For those that don’t/can’t recite racing stats, you should know that Bergmeister’s No. 45 Flying Lizard Motorsports Porsche/Riley is the same car that David Donohue drove to set the previous record of 1:40.540 (127.492 mph). You should remember that Donohue went on to win the 2009 Rolex 24 for Brumos Racing, becoming the seventh and most recent driver to go from pole to 1st place on the podium.
GT Pole Position Changes Hand
As the original pole winner Andy Lally ran a lap of 1:48.487 (118.134 mph) in his #67 TRG Porsche 911. Unfortunately, post-race tech inspection showed his rear wing to be mounted too far to the rear, causing a disqualification. As a result, his car will start from the back of the field on Saturday.
Fortunately, teammate Dominik Farnbacher was just a little over two tenths of a second behind at 1:48.781 (117.815 mph) and he and his #66 TRG Porsche were awarded P1. Farnbacher, a winner in the GT class at the Rolex 24 in 2005, was pleased with the pole, and said his Porsche performed well on the new, smoother Daytona surface.
“In the infield, especially at the horseshoe and bus stop turns, your setup has to be right or you will lose lots of time, and I found I could go fast without over-driving the car. TRG has really become the Porsche 911 expert at this race, and I am thankful for the chance to drive this car,” said Farnbacher.
Other Porsche 911 GT3 Cup qualifiers in GT included Craig Stanton/Magnus Racing (third); Nick Tandy/Burtin Racing (fourth); Shane Lewis/Chris Smith Racing (fifth); Ryan Eversley/TRG (sixth); Andrew Davis/Brumos Racing (ninth); and Jeroen Bleekemolen/TRG Black Swan Racing (tenth).
Email
. How about a 
? Anyway, you get the idea. $3 just doesn’t buy a hell of a lot.
As you listen, see if you can distinguish between the deeper baritones of the DP cars and the higher pitched GT cars. You might actually want to turn your speakers down a bit as the sound can easily overwhelm them.
