SRT Motorsports - ALMS Keys for Success - Long Beach 

April 18, 2013 , LONG BEACH, Calif., -  Friday, April 19, 2013
American Le Mans Series at Long Beach
Long Beach Street Circuit
American Le Mans Series presented by Tequila Patron
Keys For Success


KEYS FOR SUCCESS: AMERICAN LE MANS SERIES AT LONG BEACH

LONG BEACH, Calif. (Friday, April 19, 2013) – Each race weekend, SRT Motorsports provides insight on the ‘Keys for Success’ for the upcoming race. This week, Matt Bejnarowicz, Lead Engineer at SRT Motorsports, provides the keys for Saturday’s race.

Track: Long Beach Street Circuit (Race 2 of 10 in the American Le Mans Series presented by Tequila Patron)

Race: Tequila Patron American Le Mans Series at Long Beach (2 Hours)

Trivia Question: Which current SRT Motorsports driver won the GT2 class victory at the 2008 ALMS race at Long Beach? (answer below)

MATT BEJNAROWICZ (Lead Engineer, SRT Motorsports)

Qualifying, Pit Stops and Track Position: “There are two factors: it’s tough to pass because it’s a pretty narrow course and most of the passing opportunities are going to be in braking zones. Qualifying position is way more important because of difficulty to pass. If you’re doing either green flag or yellow flag stops, the pit stop timing is crucial because you just don’t have the recovery time if you have a bad stop. That will certainly show up a lot more at Long Beach than at a real long race.”

IS THERE ANYTHING STRATEGY-WISE YOU CAN DO DURING THE RACE TO GAIN TRACK POSITION? “Yeah but it kind of depends on how the race pans out. It’s tough to have a strategy like that going in; you almost have to be in a position to react. And since we’re a two-car team, we can take maybe a little more risk on one of the cars and try to plan out a different strategy than the others, try to get one of them further up if it pans out. There is that potential but I don’t think you make those decisions until the opportunity presents itself.”

Changing Track Conditions: “That’s a really big challenge. I’m sure everybody is pretty nervous about that. We have a lot of things kind of going against us; one is the fact that we’ve never raced the Viper GTS-R at Long Beach. A number of our engineers and people on the
team have been there before but in pretty different vehicles. We’ve got a little bit of history but we just don’t have that experience under our belts with this specific car. And we don’t know how the track is going to change. We’re one of the first practice sessions that goes out and it’s a pretty short session and then we go straight to qualifying. In the middle, IndyCar is going to put down a lot of track rubber and they’re going to clean the track off quite a bit. It’s going to be not only a challenge but we’ll certainly have to make some pretty heavy educated guesses about how we think the track is going to shape up.”

TRIVIA ANSWER: Dominik Farnbacher teamed with Dirk Muller to score the win in the GT2 class behind the wheel of the No. 71 entry for Tafel Racing. Farnbacher and Muller held off two entries from Flying Lizard Motorsports to score the victory.

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