#17 Team Falken Tire: Wolf Henzler, Bryan Sellers
Adriano Manocchia
This afternoon at Virginia International Raceway, the Team Falken Tire Porsche qualified eighth in the GT class of the American Le Mans Series for tomorrow’s VIR 240. The team used the two practice sessions and even qualifying session today to test various setups on the car, focusing on the balance for tomorrow’s four hour endurance race. On average, the team makes two changes every five laps on a typical practice day. After every modification, the team will evaluate the change by a several lap run, and shorten the run if needed.
Bryan Sellers qualified the #17 Porsche in the 15-minute qualifying session and will start tomorrow’s race, Round 9 at 2:30pm Eastern.
Bryan Sellers
If you look at the timesheets, it’s obvious that we struggled in qualifying today. We are behind on time because we didn’t test here, and we still have a lot of things we need to make better with the car. We’re working through our progressions right now. We made some good changes through the sessions and we made some bad changes through the sessions, but that’s part of going through it all. We still have a warm up in the morning and a four hour race. Throughout the year, including Baltimore, our strong point has not been qualifying. For us to focus on qualifying is wrong. We spend the majority of our time focusing on race distance and long runs. It’s always a little bit of a blow when you don’t qualify highly as you want, but that’s not our focus. Our focus is to make sure we’re good for tomorrow and trying to see how we can get the car as balanced as possible over a whole stint. With a four hour race, I wish I could say speed wasn’t important, because it is, but we need to do what we’ve done in a lot of the other ones and make sure we don’t make a lot of mistakes and execute well. We’ll make sure pit stops are strong, driver changes are strong, and all of the stuff you have to do to finish well.
Wolf Henzler
We know we have struggled this year in qualifying but always do better in the race, so having a four hour race helps us. It’s better for us because we know we can do consistent lap times, even if we may not be the fastest. We have a good crew for our pit stops, and always seem to make up positions because of that during the race. We just do what we always do and have a better strategy and pit stops than the others and then I’m sure we can improve our position.
Source: Team Falken Tire
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