The end of the 2006 American Le Mans Series was about as ideal for Audi as possible. The German marque completed a perfect season Saturday night with a victory in the Monterey Sports Car Championships from Allan McNish and Dindo Capello, their eighth win of the season and the feather in their championship hat.
There is obviously something about Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca that suits the Zytek LMP1. For the second straight year a Zytek prototype smashed the qualifying record for the Monterey Sports Car Championships, the final round of the 2006 American Le Mans Series season.
Penske Racing has returned to the site of its American Le Mans Series debut. At least through the first day of the Monterey Sports Car Championships things couldn’t be going much better. Romain Dumas set the fastest time in Thursday’s two-hour test session with a 1:14.962 lap around the 2.238-mile, 11-turn road course near the California coast.
The American Le Mans Series comes to a close with the legendary Laguna Seca racing circuit. It will be a four-hour event that will race into darkness for only a couple of minutes this year with sunset right around 6:30pm. There are championships on the line and a vast number of rumors of what is going on with next year.
Multimatic Motorsports Team Panoz has pulled off its best team result of the 2006 season with the Toronto-based squad finishing third and fourth in the GT2 class at Petit Le Mans.
Bill Auberlen, Joey Hand and Boris Said, driving the No. 21 BMW Team PTG M3, had to settle for a sixth place GT2 finish in today’s Petit Le Mans after running third in the closing laps of the race. The trio completed 344 laps of the 2.54-mile, 12-turn Road Atlanta circuit in the 1000-mile race, finishing 12 laps behind the winning Porsche. The No. 22 BMW Team PTG M3 of Justin Marks, Bryan Sellers and Ian James finished ninth, completing 304 laps after electrical problems late in the third hour cost the team a better finish.
Sascha Maassen increased his lead in the American Le Mans Series LMP2 driver championship after overcoming a seven-lap deficit to win the class in the 1,000-mile Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta in Braselton, Ga.
Last year’s Petit Le Mans was a bad dream for the Horag Racing team. Luckily the 2006 version of one of the cornerstone events of the American Le Mans Series turned out to be completely the opposite, and the team will return to Switzerland with the third-place trophies for its class, LMP2, after its performance at Road Atlanta Motor Sports Center here Saturday.
The Creation team fought hard, recovered from technical and physical set backs and challenged for a podium position for about 85% of the race. But, with just over an hour to go in the 1,000 mile Petit Le Mans race, the Road Atlanta track caught them out. The driving team of Jamie Campbell-Walter (GB), Nicolas Minassian (F) and Harold Primat (CH) finished in fourth place behind the winning Audi of McNish and Capello, the Zytek and Highcroft Racing’s Lola.
Banbury-based Zytek Motorsport enjoyed a superb second place at the 1000 mile Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta in the USA. Drivers Stefan Johansson, Johnny Mowlem and Haruki Kurosawa finished only second to the factory Audi diesel R10 after a gruelling 9 hour race.