During the last weekend of March, Grand-Am took the Rolex
and Continental Tire series to beautiful Barber Motorsports Park in Leeds,
Alabama, to race.
BimmerWorld Racing fielded their three car ST team for the
Barber 200. The team cars are based on
the BMW e90 platform, similar to that you would buy at the dealer – until the
BimmerWorld guys get ahold of them.
BimmerWorld (www.bimmerworld.com), a supplier of race-engineered street,
tuner, and race parts, tears the cars down to a shell, and then rebuilds them,
to the rules as allowed by Grand-Am.
Grand-Am has the thankless job of trying to equalize the performance of
cars across numerous brands, in each class.
Every team has their gripes – ours is the weight of the cars. At 2825 lbs, without the driver, the e90 is
the heaviest car in the ST field. The
BimmerWorld ST cars, while heavy for the class, exhibit the same neutral
handling, and consistent performance over the course of the race, to make them
a challenger at the end.
The Continental Tire Series runs a single, two-class race format
during the Grand-Am weekend. The class
is comprised of the larger, faster GS cars (Mustangs, M3s, Camaros, Aston-Martin
Vantages, Carreras, and Subaru’s) and the ST class is the smaller, lighter
cars, including Honda Civics, VW’s, Mini Coopers, Boxsters, Mazda MX5 Cups and
Speed 3’s, Ford Focus, and 1- and 3- series BMW’s.
Barber is a classic road racing track, unlike the rovals
(road courses combined with an oval) Grand-Am runs at Daytona and Miami in the
early season, and at Indy later in the year.
The Barber circuit has tight, twisty corners, long sweeping corners, and
a good bit of elevation change for the drivers and cars to contend with. Barber is a challenging course for the BMW’s,
as they carry the extra weight, and don’t have the blindingly fast speed of the
forced induction cars in the class. The
BMW, however, tends to be good on tires, due to the balance of the car and the
BimmerWorld setup, so it always has the chance to be there at the end of the
race.
Prior to qualifying, the BimmerWorld team cars #80 (Clay/Capestro-Dubets),
#81 (Levine/ Liefooghe) and #82 (Rogers/Thomas) decided to go out at the end of
the line for qualifying, in order to find a clear portion of track to get a
qualifying time on. The three team cars
went out nose-to-tail, and were on a good lap that would have put them solidly
in a top fifteen position, but a poorly timed black flag was thrown by Grand-Am
prior to start-finish, negating the speedy lap.
When the track was reopened, the #82 got separated from the team cars,
and missed the opportunity for a coordinated qualifying effort. The #82 BimmerWorld/Brakleen car, due to some
poor timing with a black flagged course, and started out the race in 27th
position out of 40 ST cars.
A Continental Tire Challenge race start is a split start,
with the GS cars taking the green flag first, followed shortly by the ST green
flag. At Barber, a few “overly enthusiastic”
GS drivers (other more colorful words were used to describe them in the paddock
and offices of the Grand-Am officials, but this is a family publication) balled
up the initial start of the race, leaving the remnants of six GS cars scattered
around in Turn 1. This caused an
immediate yellow flag, putting the field under the control of the pace
car. The ensuing clean up took close to
20 minutes, with the cars circulating behind the pace car in single file order.
After the carnage of the initial start was cleaned up and
the field thinned, the green flag was thrown again at start/finish. Unfortunately, a number of cars in the GS
field had not learned anything from the previous start, and by the time the ST
field came through start-finish, GS cars were strewn along the front straight,
and Turn 1, and the yellow flags were out.
At this point in the race, the BimmerWorld team chose to do
driver changes for all three cars, putting Capestro-Dubets, Liefooghe, and
Thomas in the cars, and fuel them for the finish of the race. Following the driver changes, the GS field
settled down a bit, and allowed some racing to occur. Liefooge took the lead in the #81 car, and
Thomas in the #82 Brakleen car worked his way up the field to eventually land
in the #2 spot, behind teammate LIefooge.
The cars raced together, until the final three laps, when two
competitors got by him, splitting the #81 and #82. On the final lap, Thomas was pushed off the
course by a competitor, losing the #4 spot.
When the checkered flag flew, BimmerWorld had a good showing
– a win for the #81 car, and a fifth place finish for Rogers/Thomas in the #82
BimmerWorld/Brakleen car. Clay and
Capestro-Dubets had some hard luck with contact with a competitor at Barber
that slid them back in the standings.
The cars, however, are showing decent speed, but better yet, showing the
consistency to win that BimmerWorld and BMW are known for.
Stay tuned for the action at the Kia 200 at Homestead-Miami
Speedway, April 28th. The
race will be televised on SPEED (or SPEEDHD) on 5/12, 12am ET and 5/13 2:30am ET.
Bring on Miami!
