Pirelli says its P Zero racing tires “tamed another tough race circuit” on Sunday as they withstood the extreme heat radiating from record track surface temperatures at New Jersey Motorsports Park.
The event featured a $20,000 Pirelli P Zero Club payout for the race winners.
Alex Gurney and Jon Fogarty notched their first victory of the season and claimed the Daytona Prototype “triple bonus” that went along with the checkered flag.
In the GT division, SpeedSource scored a top-three podium sweep with a trio of Mazda RX-8s that was led by the winning duo of Sylvain Tremblay and Jonathan Bomarito.
“We did more miles on our first set of Pirellis than anybody else,” says Fogarty, who drove more than 90 minutes in his opening stint on a single set of tires. “We did 165 miles on the Pirellis and we were still running there at the end. We really took the Pirellis to the limit and they held in there. It is a tough, demanding place and the Pirellis worked.”
Fogarty and Gurney beat Scott Pruett and Memo Rojas across the finish line by 3.674 seconds.
In GT racing, Tremblay and Bomarito won their second contest of the season and led teammates John Edwards and Adam Christodoulou across the line by .170 of a second. Jeff Segal and Emil Assentato finished third.
“The Pirellis performed really well,” Segal says. “The weather was obviously a lot hotter than it is at most other races, which really taxes the tires. It might not be the most demanding track for the tire, but definitely the weather put them to the test and our Pirellis worked really well. We definitely made some big changes this weekend to accommodate the track and give the tires what they wanted, and in the race it worked perfectly.”
Next up for Pirelli and the Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series is the Aug. 6-7 Crown Royal 200 on the NASCAR short course at New York’s Watkins Glen International Raceway. The two-hour timed race can be seen live on The Speed Channel Saturday, Aug. 7 at 6 p.m. ET/3 p.m. PT.
For more information, visit www.us.pirelli.com.
