No 2011 One and Done

 

The 2010 Rolex Sports Car Series season for the Action Express Racing team can be succinctly described: “One and Done.”

So miserable was AER’s season after coming off its 2010 Rolex 24 at Daytona win, established by regulars Joao Barbosa (left) and Terry Borcheller (with one-race assists by Ryan Dalziel and Mike Rockenfeller), that in just two 2011-season races the team’s already surpassed where it was the same time last year, having covered two of two possible top-five finishes.

Barbosa, Borcheller and J.C. France – who during the 2010-2011off-season honed its driver exchange to likely the quickest seen on pit road at Homestead-Miami Speedway (HMS) – the No. 9 AER Porsche-Riley (below right at HMS) this year has finished third and fourth in two races.

Yet, even with three drivers where only two are supposed to be the “ideal,” Barbosa, Borcheller and France might well have finished even better if not for a pit-stop oversight.

“Joao was pulling out and a tire ran over an air hose by about, maybe, two inches,” a frustrated France said after Grand-Am officials directed the No. 9 Porsche-Riley to take a 30-second break from last-hour track action – a one-lap loss when pit-in and pit-out drive times are taken into consideration, dropping the team from fifth to 10th-place in the process.

“We struggled a little bit early but we could run with anybody out there,” Barbosa said. “The results are starting to show and hopefully we can keep fighting for podium positions.”

While former NASCAR Sprint Cup official-turned-sportscar team manager Gary Nelson believes the team’s benefitted from an off-season demeanor change, an in-race slip often is the difference between standing tall at the top of a podium or falling somewhere short of it.

“The biggest disappointment was the black flag because it was such a minor slip on our part,” Nelson said. “We felt like both cars were competitive but we have a little more work to do to fight for first place.”

Meanwhile, the No. 5 AER Porsche-Riley, coming off a ninth-place finish in January at Daytona International Speedway (at left), David Donohue and Darren Law’s second, second-place finish at HMS in as many Rolex Series races there now have helped this year’s clearly obvious two-car team (in 2010: part AER; part Brumos) cover the four possible top-10 finishes thus far available to the team.

The effort also shows up in the Daytona Prototype driver points, too, where the five drivers jointly occupy second and third-places – separated by two points, 56 to 54 – though Barbosa, Borcheller and France are tied in second place with Max Angelelli and Ricky Taylor, drivers of the No. 10 SunTrust Chevrolet-Dallara (right).

As have the AER drivers, the SunTrust pair already is off to a far better season as compared to 2010, having started 2011 with fifth and third-place finishes at DIS and HMS, respectively. (“Started” with “finishes.” Don’t ya just love English!?)

After their 2010 win at Daytona, Barbosa and Borcheller were the worst of the DP lot at the following HMS race and immediately fell from Sitting On Top Of The World to sixth in the DP driving championship.

Likewise at first struggling last year but eventually rallying to an end of year second-place 2010 DP Rolex Series championship finish, Angelelli and R. Taylor (below, celebrating their 3rd-place HMS podium) also were well down the points list in eighth place after the HMS race, one point behind the AER duo.

(“Ah, um,” the reader says to himself at this point, “Grand-Am doesn’t fractionalize its points system. How could sixth- and eighth-places be separated by but one point yet be two-places distant in the championship hunt?”

(The short answer: “Scott Tucker” occupied seventh place.

(A somewhat longer answer because the short answer doesn’t at all address the “how”: Tucker, Level 5 Motorsports team owner/driver, who presumably sought seat time for himself and fellow team drivers as well as gaining valuable “quality time” for tuning Level 5’s pit, logistics and shop crews, hung for but two 2010 Rolex Series races before making like a Continental Tire and rolling down the road.

(In those first two races – there would not be a third 2010 Rolex Series race for Tucker –he respectively posting third and 11th-place finishes at Daytona International Speedway and HMS, while Angelelli and R. Taylor posted back-to-back sixth-place finishes.

(Given an equal “50” championship-points subtotal ((a full season constituting a championship-points “total”)) a tiebreaker based on “best comparative finish” thus thrust Tucker ahead by one place in the standings relative to Angelelli and R. Taylor.

(The above – whether Ol DC’s four paragraphs or someone else’s one paragraph – demonstrates at least one reason journalists and editors are averse to midseason points nitpicking, instead preferring the nice and somewhat neater ordinal scoring thus far thankfully seen in 2011.

(Put another, final way: allowing even a five-driver, second-place logjam to be resolved at season’s end is far better than blowing tight print space having to explain nuance while, probably, boring to death the reader. “Just saying ‘no’” to any coverage all too often is an editor’s immediate response.)

Now, where were we?

Ah, yes . . .

There should be little doubt drivers Scott Pruett, Memo Rojas, team director Tim “Too Sly” Keene (at left with a Paul Smith Guitar award after 2010 Miller Motorsports Park win) and the whole of the Chip Ganassi Racing w/ Felix (y José) Sabates sportscar team is a darn-capable outfit.

Remember, so determined were Grand-Am officials to ascertain the TELMEX team’s “secret of success” that disassembled and, in at least one case dismembered, was the car which first received the 2011 Rolex 24 At Daytona’s checkered flag – nothing “illegal” having been found at the processes’ completion.

(So microscopically was the No. 01 BMW-Riley examined that the team later privately claimed the exercise – unsubstantiated but believable – cost upward of $100,000 in damages, never mind related costs of having on-hand five mechanics, a truck driver and, probably, Keene.)

Nowhere in history have nor will the future bring anyone or anything that endlessly will be “Sitting On Top of the World”

Some team at some unknown time will successfully wrestle the dominance of the Rolex Series from the TELMEX (the No. 01 TELMEX BMW-Riley passing the No. 99 GAINSCO Chevrolet-Riley at HMS, below right) team’s grasp, such not so much reflecting any desire on this writer’s part as much as a recognition of history; any history.

Whether the 2011 season will produce another champion is plainly debatable and not something easily wrestled from a team to which winning is nearly a birthright.

Yet, one gets the feeling a reprise of 2007 may be afoot, a season during which a pitched battle for the DP championship’s topmost honors (in GT, as well) ensued throughout, ultimately determined in a final, knockdown drag-out race at the end of which first-through-fourth DP Rolex Championship places were separated by a mere 27 points.

Though certainly not on the scale nor importance of, say, World War II’s Pacific campaign, this year’s championship fight is one which might well be of epic proportions relative to racing, and it’s one of those which people will wish to have personally witnessed.

Later,

DC