Racing at the longest circuit on the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship (TUSC) is always exciting for every driver, but it is not without its challenges.
The 4.048-mile road course at Elkhart Lake, WI, brings with it numerous corners, but also many flat-out sections where the Team Falken Porsche 911 RSR excels, and the team continued to build upon its strengths in order to finish out the season.
Despite an eighth place finish in GTLM at Road America this past weekend, the team, piloted by Bryan Sellers and Wolf Henzler, started strong in the first practice because the track was wet, which is one of the advantages of the AZENIS tire on which the car races. Day two required a switch to a dry setup, and the team found a good setting to work with through its dry tire, resulting in closing the window in qualifying times with an optimized setting.
“We held with the front pack during the race, but when we rolled the dice on a fueling strategy, we unfortunately didn’t come out on top,” declared Phil Howard, Team Manager. “Sometimes it works out that way; clearly, it was very disappointing to everyone.”
“Early in the race it looked like it was going to be possible to have a good race result,” stated Sellers. “The team had a great pit stop that took us from 7th to a running position of 4th. Wolf was able to keep us there. Through a series of pit stops and the decision to take two tires instead of four we were ultimately relegated to 8th place. This was a frustrating result with such a strong performance by everyone on the team.”
“We’ll move forward from this experience,” added Nick Fousekis, Falken’s Director of Motorsports and Event Marketing. “We still want to finish the season strong. As always, our Falken engineers are developing new tire technology for the last three races. And naturally, we expect to finish strong at Petit Le Mans, the last race of the season.”
The next round of the TUSC moves to Virginia International Raceway August 21-23 for the two-hour and 40-minute Oak Tree Grand Prix, featuring the GTLM and GTD classes.
