American Le Mans Series

Team ADT Champion racing starts from second row at Mid-Ohio

Team ADT Champion Racing will start from the second row for today’s American Le Mans Series race at Mid-Ohio. Leading the pack will be the pole sitter Hayanari Shimoda from Zytek Engineering, who broke the pole setting record set last year by James Weaver from Dyson Racing. JJ Lehto qualified the No. 1 Audi R8 in third position and Emanuele Pirro will sit alongside him in fourth position.

“Obviously we’d like to be further up the grid but we are quite happy to be in third and fourth position,” said Brad Kettler, Technical Director for Team ADT Champion Racing. “The cars went almost as fast as we thought they would. The Zytek is unbelievably fast but hasn’t been that consistent in practice. They may be quicker in qualifying but they still have to race us.”

Quotes:

JJ Lehto: “Well you can see the difference between the vintage cars and the cars of the new era. We should be more than afraid of them now, Zytek and the other cars of the future. We did the maximum that we could do today. We still struggled with the tires. The tires have been a bad link for us this weekend. Not enough grip and it’s been difficult for us. It will definitely be exciting tomorrow!”

Marco Werner: “It’s okay that we are on the second row. We made a step from the practice to the qualifying in terms of time and that’s the best way. Tomorrow it will be important for us to hold it together. We are not quicker than the other cars but maybe we can win it again in the pit-stops like we have before.”

Frank Biela: “I think that we did a good job today. The car was much better to drive today versus yesterday. Unfortunately it is still only third and fourth position for us on the grid. We did expect Zytek to be fast again today and they set an impressive time. But we’ll see how they do tomorrow.”

Emanuele Pirro: “The good news is that we are consistently improving. We arrived here with much less experience than car No. 1 and we have had to do a lot more work to get familiar with the car. During qualifying I was quite happy with the set-up of the car. Third and fourth, that’s not too bad considering we are competing with a car (Zytek) that is running under different rules. It’s a shame though because people then think there is a car better than the Audi R8 and that is just not true.”