Long Beach, CA – April 16, 2012
TruSpeed Motorsports had a mixed weekend in the Pirelli World Challenge race on the streets of Long Beach, CA, eventually bringing home three of their four drivers inside the top 10. Lawson Aschenbach, driving the #1 PrivacyStar / Entrust Porsche 911 GT3 Cup slipped one spot in the championship to sit 3rd overall after a 5th place finish at Long Beach, while Justin Marks, driving the #46 GoPro / MMX Porsche 911 GT3 put the tumult of the opening weekend at St. Petersburg behind him to come home a solid 8th. Tomy Drissi, in the #47 The Three Stooges Porsche 911 GT3 Cup, was his normal solid self, claiming a 6th place finish to climb in the championship. Jeff Courtney, driving the #99 Kenda Tire / RecStuff.com Porsche 911 GT3 Cup, had contact in the race and was forced to retire.
The team entered the race weekend in the thick of the championship battle, and enthused about racing in front of its home crowd, just 30 minutes from its race shop in Costa Mesa, CA. Unpredictable and sopping wet weather greeted the team on Friday morning, but the team had its spirits lifted when Justin Marks and Tomy Drissi went 1-2 in the weekend’s first session. The weather was forecast to be dry and sunny for Sunday’s race, and as the team set about prepping the cars for qualifying, they compensated for the difficultly they’d had getting their tires up to optimum pressure in the Friday session by sending all four drivers out at slightly higher pressures.
Team Manager Tyler Tadevic explained, “The circumstances of the qualifying session were a bit different than what we’d experienced in Friday practice, and simply put, the Cadillacs and the Volvo were just on it. We’d increased the initial tire pressures for all of our guys, and just at the tail end of the short session, Lawson got loose and kissed the wall with the left rear of his car into turn 6. That incident resulted in some more significant damage to the sub-frame of the car than we could initially tell just by looking at it, but it was a testament to our crew that they got his car back in racing shape.”
As the TruSpeed cars took the green flag for Sunday’s race, with Lawson in 5th, Justin in 9th, Tomy in 11th and Jeff in 13th, the field bunched into turn one and Lawson, having gone around the outside of the #77 Ferrari into turn one, got balked and fell back to 9th place by the end of the first lap. He would spend the duration of the race battling with teammate Tomy Drissi, and eventually both he and Tomy were able to get around the Ferrari and begin to catch the lead trio. The race was a rare caution-free event, and due to the tight confines of the street circuit, passing was at a premium. Lawson went on to finish 5th, Tomy 6th and Justin 8th, while Jeff had contact that forced him to retire from the race.
Tadevic said, “We had a mixed weekend, if I’m honest. As a team, we’ve yet to put together a really solid weekend here at Long Beach, but we managed to salvage good championship points here. We’d hoped for more, and we feel like we left some fruit on the tree, but the next few races will really be a dogfight for the entire paddock. With Miller coming up next, we may be a bit down on straight-line speed to some of the larger displacement cars, but Laguna’s just after that and we’ve traditionally gone well there. All of our guys have ample experience at the next two tracks, and as they say, it’s a long championship and we’re just getting underway. We’re looking forward to getting out to Salt Lake City here in a few weeks and taking the fight back to the Cadillac boys there!”
TruSpeed Motorsports races next on April 27-28 at Miller Motorsports Park, outside of Salt Lake City, UT.
