Grand Prix
of Miami
March 5,
2005
The Rolex 24 always brings a few strong
teams that come out just for the watch, then focus their efforts in
other series. The second race on the Grand Am schedule has
traditionally been at Homestead-Miami Speedway, and this race is where
you really see who the competition will be for the season. It is
safe to say that this year's GT field will be extremely tight, and every
spot on the podium will be hard-fought. A tremendous 25 GT cars
started the race, with 3 cars fielded by Autometrics Motorsports.
Steve Johnson shared the #88 '05 GT3 Cup
with Robert Nearn, both coming off strong finishes at Daytona. Tom
Soriano and Bransen Patch piloted the #94 Porsche. This season's
#14 car will again be driven by Cory Friedman and Leh Keen.
The qualifying Grid was very tight, with
the top 8 cars within eight 10ths of a second. Leh started the #14
car 7th in class. Nearn rounded out the top 10 in the #88 car.
Keen maintained his starting position at
the beginning of the race, running as high as fifth, but he generally
stayed in 6th-7th position for about 40 minutes when a yellow gave us a
good chance to fill the fuel. The #88 car opted to stay out and
maintain track position. When the green flag dropped again, Leh
was in 11th, but quickly moved back up to 7th. At this point,
Nearn was leading GT in the #88 car. Keen was quickly picking up positions,
and just past the 1-hour mark, he was up to 5th in class, just behind
the #88 car and only 21 seconds away from the class leader.
At
the half-way point in the race. Soriano was driving the #94 car,
which had early trouble when a DP knocked Patch off-course. The
#88 car made its first and only stop, and Johnson took over driving
duties. Leh stayed in the car until his fuel was nearly
empty. A convenient caution about 15 minutes later gave us the
perfect opportunity to make our last stop and send Cory out with fresh
tires. This yellow worked out great for us, and Cory took the
green flag 3rd in GT.
With a
half-hour to go in the race, which was limited to 109 laps or 2:45, the
#65 car, which lead GT passed Cory to put us a lap down, but we still
lead the 4th place #21 BMW by over 40 seconds. Auberlen's laps
were only negligibly faster than Cory's, so with only 20 laps to go, it
was unlikely that Friedman would be challenged for position if the race
were to finish entirely under a green flag.
Unfortunately,
that did not work out for us, as a very short yellow came out. It
was just long enough to knock our lead down to less than 2 seconds over
the 4th-6th place cars, which were nose-to-tail. Surrounding the
#14 car at the restart was about a half-dozen DP cars. The
prototypes are always anxious to get by GT cars on a restart, so Cory
stayed out of their way to avoid being "removed" from their
way. This provided the GT cars close behind with an opportunity to
get around and push us back to 6th. Cory was turning our fastest
laps of the race, but was only keeping pace with the cars in front and
was not able to make any moves. The #21 BMW, which had fallen to
fifth, slowed for a short period before returning to speed. This
allowed us to move back into 5th position where we would finish.
After two minor incidents, the #94 car finished in 17th, and Johnson
took the checkers 13th in class.
Finishing
5th in a strong 25 car field is respectable, but we are disappointed to
have gotten so close to a podium before the final caution. Between
this race and Daytona, Autometrics Motorsports is 3rd in Team points,
and Cory and Leh share 3rd in the driver's championship.
The
next race is at California Speedway at the beginning of April. The
#14 and #94 Cup cars will be running along with our #45 Grand Am Cup
car. Driver line-ups will be the same as Homestead. |
