This Weekend at Lime Rock Park Looking for First Top-Five Finish of 2013 and MoreNo. 48 Chopard/TOTAL Porsche 911 GT3 RSR and Paul Miller Racing Ready to Break 2013 Streak of Sixth-Place Finishes in Front of More Than 200 Sponsors, Guests, Family and Friends Bryce Miller, Marco Holzer and the No. 48 Chopard/TOTAL Porsche 911 GT3 RSR Paul Miller Racing team will be looking to break into the top five and more this weekend at Lime Rock Park where a group of more than 200 corporate guests, sponsors, employees, friends and family members will be on-site in support of the team for its home race at the American Le Mans Northeast Grand Prix, July 46.
The Paul Miller Auto Group is based in nearby Parsippany, New Jersey, which is also the corporate headquarters of Paul Miller Racing. Less than a 90 minute drive from the greater New York and New Jersey metropolitan area, Lime Rock Park has long been considered Paul Miller Racings home track and, more recently, the American Le Mans Series (ALMS) Northeast Grand Prix has served as the teams home race.
This weekends sizable contingent of supporters may provide the catalyst Miller, Holzer and the No. 48 Chopard/TOTAL Porsche Paul Miller Racing team need to produce their best result of the season in the featured 2-3/4-hour race.
Round four of this years 10-race ALMS schedule, the Northeast Grand Prix airs live on ESPN2 this Saturday, July 6, at 3 p.m. EDT/12 p.m. PDT. Simultaneous live streaming on ESPN3 begins with an online pre-race show at 2:45 p.m. EDT/11:45 a.m. PDT.
Paul Miller Racing comes to Lime Rock following its most competitive performance of the season one race ago at Laguna Seca in mid-May where the team ran in the lead pack for the majority of the four-hour race. Only a slight miscue in the teams final pit stop prevented a higher finish in the race that saw the No. 48 cross the line in sixth place for the third time in as many races this season.
The excitement has really been growing in the team, Miller said. I think we all know the performance is there to deliver a result well within the top five and we showed that at Laguna until the last hour. This break between races has been really effective for us, we had some productive testing here at Lime Rock on Tuesday, and we feel like we have made some headway and have narrowed in on a window with this car that we feel good about.
Holzer is a factory works Porsche driver from Germany and more than understands the power a large contingent of off-track supporters can bring to a racing team.
It is a big event for the team, Holzer said. They have a lot of guests coming and I hope we can give them a good show and finally go to the podium now. We had some bad luck at Laguna Seca but everybody on the team is ready to meet the goal of a much better result.
Short in distance but high on speed, Lime Rock Park is the smallest track on the ALMS tour at 1.5 miles in length but produces lap times over 100 mph in qualifying on the seven-turn layout.
I am really looking forward to Lime Rock, Holzer said. I had a fantastic qualifying last year with P2 in GT. It is a really short track so I think qualifying is really important, like Long Beach and Baltimore.
Holzer and Miller both drove in a Tuesday afternoon test session at Lime Rock Park yesterday.
From the beginning, the track was a little bit damp because there was a lot of rain here the last few days, Holzer said. So it was hard to compare but it wasnt bad, we checked the car, everything was working fine and now we have to check the data. We have two days off to review, we have a good car and we will have a good setup for the start of the weekend.
A two-day event, the Northeast Grand Prix begins with practice on Friday before GT qualifying later that afternoon at 4:55 p.m. EDT. Qualifying for all ALMS classes can be viewed online at ESPN3 beginning at 4:25 p.m. EDT, Friday, July 5. Race-day Saturday begins with a 25 minute warm-up at 9:55 a.m. EDT before that afternoons featured American Le Mans Northeast Grand Prix at 3 p.m. EDT.
Noteworthy
- Bryce Miller has extensive history at Lime Rock and some justifiably high expectations this weekend. We are really hoping to elevate our game starting here at Lime Rock, Miller said. I have some of my earliest experience racing in cars at Lime Rock, probably in a Skip Barber Formula Dodge, that was when the cars still had radial tires on them, no chicanes, no wings, it was awesome! One of my first pro races was in Formula 2000, running against Andy Lally and that whole crew, and I later had a third place in GRAND-AM here in 2007 in a Porsche GT3 with Dirk Muller the year we won the championship.
- Holzer has run a few races in Europe since the mid-May Laguna Seca race, including the Nurburgring 24 Hours, but that hasnt been his only activity during the seven-week break in the ALMS schedule. I was training a lot, Holzer said. Now we are going into the summer time when it is really hot in the car. You have to really be fit and focused and that has been a main goal the last few weeks.
