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Preparing For Petit Le Mans

A very wet Road Atlanta on Friday morning. [Photo by Jack Webster]

By Eddie LePine & Jack Webster

As promised, it was raining on Friday morning at Road Atlanta. As a matter of fact, it started raining quite heavily just as the last practice session was to begin for the IMSA TUDOR cars that would be participating in tomorrow’s 17th Annual Petit Le Mans powered by Mazda.

As such, almost all of the cars elected to stay in the garage area and not even make an appearance in pit lane. A few Porsches went out to test the conditions, but that was short lived, as the session was red flagged once thunder and lightning arrived to accompany the heavy rain.

Fortunately, the rain blew through quicker than was forecast, and the afternoon qualifying sessions were run in dry but cloudy conditions.

Qualifying on the pole was the Corvette DP driven by Joao Barbosa, who put in a lap of 1:14.508, besting the Wayne Taylor Racing Corvette DP by about a quarter of a second. Unfortunately, the car that most people had favored to contend for pole position, the new Oak Racing Ligier HPD came to a stop on the circuit on its out lap and never reappeared for qualifying. The time set by the pole winning car was logged as a new track record, as the P class displaces the former DP class from the Grand Am era.

In the PC class, Jack Hawksworth piloted his Oreca FLM09 to pole with a lap of 1:16.210, setting a new track record for the PC class at Road Atlanta.
In GTLM, the factory Porsche 911 RSR driven by Nick Tandy bested Giancarlo Fischella’s Ferrari F458 Italia, taking pole position with a time of 1:18.350, which was also a new track record.

In GTD, there was spirited competition, with no fewer than 7 cars qualifying within one second of the pole time of 1:22.395 set by James Davison in the Aston Martin V12 Vantage.

Saturday’s race promises to provide close competition as 51 cars are scheduled to take the green flag at 11:15am. 10 hours later, or 1000 miles (whichever comes first), the inaugural season of the TUDOR United Sports Car Championship will come to a close.

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