Lone Star le Mans ready to roll at CoTA
Tuesday, September 12, 2017
Riding high on the crest of a Mexican wave, the Aston Martin Racing team will have made the relatively short trip due north from Mexico City to Austin, Texas ready for the final visit of the World Endurance Championship at the Circuit of the Americas this weekend.
Mirroring their GTE Pro finish of 2016 in Mexico, the AMR team will be hoping to use the impetus gained from their Mexico win two weeks ago to rekindle their 2017 season in a similar manner and take the fight to the (to date) superior Ferrari 488, Porsche 911 RSR and Ford GT's.
In the absence of anything to the contrary, the Balance of Performance applied for Mexico remains in force however the two thousand meter reduction in altitude between locations will have a dramatic impact on the performances across the range.
Despite both the #95 and #98 cars finishing on their respective podiums last time out, Mexico became a race to forget for the #97 car of Darren Turner, Jonny Adam and Daniel Serra as a progressive brake issue forced the car to worked on (without success and despite the most valiant of attempts) in the garage eventually ending up not being classified in the results.
We heard from Turner that the issue first reared its head during free practice before reaching a race ending magnitude just a few laps into the race. Undoubtedly, every inch of that cars braking system will have been replaced ready for CoTA and the offending parts returned to their supplier for analysis - that won't be allowed to happen again.
With the driver line ups for each of the team's three cars remaining constant, the only deviation from that of Mexico will be the return of the Valero livery on the #97 car in a race that should also be Serra's last with the team but we're sure that they will be re-evaluate that before too soon and that he gets to see out the season he started.
Going into the event, the #67 Ford still leads the GTE Pro class with 96 points with the #95 and #97 equal in fifth with 69 points whilst in GTE Am the #77 Dempsey Proton Porsche remains the dominant force with 120 points but with the #61 Clearwater Ferrari and #98 AMR both within ten points to the leader.
Both Championships remain completely open.
Track action starts Thursday evening (European time) with the first two Free Practice sessions with the final FP session Friday afternoon and Qualifying later Friday night (again both European time zones).
The start of the 6Hours begins 18.00hrs BST
Photo credits - AMR