Follow Green Car Magazine on Twitter
Dyson Racing and Marino Franchitti scored their third LMP2 pole in a row today for the 12th Annual Petit Le Mans Powered by MAZDA6. Coming off a team one – two qualifying effort at the last race, Franchitti set his fast time six minutes into the twenty-five minute qualifying session in the #20 BP Mazda Lola he shares with Butch Leitzinger and Ben Devlin this weekend. The Dyson entry was over a second quicker than the second fastest time. The team was consistently quick in practice and posted fastest class times in three of the five track sessions leading up to qualifying.
“The balance was right there, right away when we started practice this week,” said Franchitti. “The guys have done their homework and the engineering group did a great job with the simulations. We were pretty confident that we had a car capable of competing for the pole. This is a fast track and when you put together a good lap here, it just makes you smile. My hats off to Road Atlanta for the yeoman’s job they did getting this track ready for the race after last week’s rains.”
The #16 BP car of Chris Dyson and Guy Smith will be leading the race to clean fuels at tomorrow’s ten-hour classic endurance race. They will be running an advanced biofuel developed by BP combining gasoline, ethanol and biobutanol. Being an experimental exercise limited to Dyson Racing, the #16 Lola will not run for points during the race and will start from the back of the grid.
“The ALMS has always been about relevance and innovation,” noted Dyson. “Mazda and BP have a commitment to using motorsports to test and prove clean technologies. It is fascinating to be on the cutting edge of technology that will end up on the highway one day. We are proud to be part of this partnership because we are using motor racing to make a difference in the world.”
Added John Doonan, Manager Motorsports Team Development for Mazda, “Ware grateful to the ALMS, the ACO, and IMSA to allow us to do essentially a public test of biobutanol. It is exciting to be at the forefront of the next generation of alternative and bio fuels. With biobutanol, you have a cleaner burning, more powerful, better fuel mileage product that we will race here and at Mazda
Popularity: 2% [?]
What Readers are Saying