Michelin and Porsche prevailed on a hot steamy day at Connecticut’s Lime Rock Park for the fifth round of the 2010 American Le Mans Series (ALMS) as Klaus Graf and Greg Pickett took the checkered flag. Michelin-sponsored racers swept the first five places overall along with class wins in Prototype and GT.
Using a two pit stop strategy that kept him in the car for the final two hours in the 95 degree heat and humidity, Graf took the lead on lap 98 with just over an hour and nine minutes remaining. Graf built a lead of nearly 21 seconds, only to have the relentless push by arch-rival David Brabham cut the gap to a single car length with 10 minutes left to go.
Taking advantage of a perfect exit onto the main straightway, Brabham began to draw along side Graf just as the leader moved right to avoid a cluster of slower cars. Brabham was forced to the grass by Graf, who had not expected him to arrive so quickly. Graf was then bumped from his left side.
Graf was assessed a stop-and-go penalty, but the off-course excursion had punctured Brabham’s right rear tire. After each called upon the pit lane, Graf emerged with a 30-second lead over Brabham, which he carried to a 27-second victory.
The two-hour, 45-minute race at the 1.53 mile circuit, the shortest track of the ALMS season, saw close competition with the leaders constantly in traffic. The winning team and the second-place duo of Brabham and Simon Pagenaud each completed more than 200 passes in traffic during the course of the race.
“Hats off to our technical partners at Michelin,” says team owner/co-driver Greg Pickett. “We are so fortunate to have Michelin and Porsche as our technical partners; they are both a big part of our success.”
“As always, Michelin helped us to choose the right tires,” says Graf.
Michelin race engineers helped the winners pick an asymmetric setup with different compound tires on different sides of the cars.
Taking their third victory of the season, Joerg Bergmeister and Patrick Long scored a narrow fourth consecutive Lime Rock victory that moves them back atop the 2010 ALMS GT championship standings.
“We had a very good strategy, and the consistency of the Michelin tires helped us to have the handling that we needed to win again,” says Bergmeister.
In the LMP Challenge class for identical prototypes racing on Michelins, Gunnar Jeannette and Elton Julian Gunnar scored their second win of the season.
“We flat-spotted our right front tire early in the race avoiding contact with another car. We changed that one tire on our pit stop and ran the other three tires for the entire race,” says Jeannette, who teased Michelin motorsports manager Silvia Mammone by noting, “Sorry we didn’t change (buy) more tires, but your Michelin tires are so good that we just run them forever.” (Team Gunnar ran the recent Salt Lake City event on a single set of Michelins.)
Pickett and Graf also became the first racers to claim a second Michelin Green X Challenge victory this year. Mika Salo and Pierre Kaffer won the GT class at Lime Rock using E85R fuel.
For more information, visit www.michelinman.com.
