American Le Mans Series

Flying Lizard Repaired and Ready

© Flying Lizard - Bob Chapman

The Flying Lizard squad heads North this week for the eighth race of the 10-race ALMS season, the Labor Day Grand Prix of Mosport, near Toronto, Ontario. After a rough race at Road America last week, the Lizards made an unscheduled stop this week at their Sonoma shop to repair the No. 44 Porsche, which was heavily damaged in the morning warmup prior to the race. The Porsche has been fully repaired and will be ready for this Sunday’s race.
The driver line-up for Mosport will be Johannes van Overbeek, who is leading in the ALMS drivers’ GT2 championship points, and Marc Lieb in the No. 45 Porsche. Lieb is filling in for Johannes’ regular teammate Wolf Henzler who has a scheduling conflict with the Mosport race. (Henzler will be back with Johannes for Petit Le Mans and Laguna Seca.) Lonnie Pechnik and Seth Neiman will team up once again in the team’s No. 44 Porsche.
Flying Lizard still leads in the ALMS GT2 team championship points, but "we didn’t do ourselves any favors at Road America" according to team crew chief Tommy Sadler. "The team did a good job to get some points in the face of some tough circumstances, but now our lead is down to nine points, with both the Risi Ferrari and Petersen teams on our heels. This is going to be an exciting run to the finish, especially with two of the last three races awarding bonus points. We need to run strong and beat our competition. And we need the 44 to do well and take some points from them, too."

Chief Strategist Thomas Blam added, "Mosport is a challenging track and it’s tough to predict how the field will perform here. It’s a fast, short circuit with extremely fast corners. The GT2 Porsche teams will be working hard to maximize rear grip, and all cars will be balancing the tradeoff between aerodynamic grip and speed — basically decreasing aero grip to maximize speed on the straights. The Ferraris should do well here in the long fast corners. The BMWs at Road America had a better showing than expected — they’ve clearly been able to get something more out of the cars over the last month — so they could continue to a factor the rest of the season. The Panoz’ have been struggling over the last few races, but we also can’t count them out yet — especially on their home turf. "

Reflecting on the challenge ahead, van Overbeek said, "We’ll see some aggressive racing in the last three races as the teams go into final battle for the championship. My goal is to keep this a clean race and finish well: to not finish at this point would be disastrous but we need to finish as high as possible. I’m looking forward to having Marc on board with us again for this race: he’s a great guy and we had a positive experience driving together at Sebring."