American Le Mans Series

Corsa Motorsports qualifies 7th at home race

© American Le Mans Series

Salt Lake City-based Corsa Motorsports will start seventh in the GT2 class Sunday in the American Le Mans Series Larry H. Miller Dealerships Utah Grand Prix Presented by The Grand and Little America Hotels. Sandy, Utah resident Gunnar Jeannette qualified the team’s No. 48 Alabama Motorsports Park Ferrari F430 GT in Saturday afternoon’s qualifying session with the team’s fastest lap of the weekend at 1:48.399. He will be joined in the cockpit by co-driver Johnny Mowlem.

In its last two outings, Corsa Motorsports has qualified eighth and seventh, respectively, before finishing fourth. Three laps into the qualifying session Jeannette was in position three with his time. One lap later he went hard into “The Attitudes” (Turns 16, 17, 18), causing the car to spin and resulting with his Dunlop-shod Ferrari in a dust trap.

“The car was working really well and I got a little greedy heading in [The Attitudes] and bottomed the whole car out in the bottom of the turn,” he explained. “We’re pretty happy with the time; it’s our best of the weekend. We are just a little worried about the tires after the spin. We are supposed to start on these per the IMSA and American Le Mans rules.”

Team owner Steve Pruitt noted that a lot of hard work has gone into making Corsa Motorsports competitive this weekend. “We still haven’t had time to really test the new Dunlops, but the team has worked really hard trying to dial in the set-up. We’ve been really consistent with our lap times in race set-up and feel like our Ferrari will race well.”

Other GT2 teams took as many as 10 laps before posting their fastest time. The No. 45 and No. 62 cars tied with the session’s fastest time of 1:37.135. Action will commence at 1 p.m. MT Sunday and will be broadcast live on SPEED.