Laguna Seca: TUSC Cars Lack of Track Time

Qualifying is going to be streaming live at 7:55 EST on IMSA.COM

 

it's a weird race weekend format for sure. Conti Tire race is longer than either TUSC race, Lambo Trofeo (a gentleman racer series) gets 2 races and lots of primo track time, TUSC teams had inspection/tech Thursday (so teams had to be there all day Thurs and Friday with hotels, food, etc) and didn't get on track until today.

then the IMSA series get split P/GTLM and PC/GTD into two 2 hour races instead of the traditional 4 hour under the excuse of not enough pit stalls, but Conti (which requires driver change pit stops too) had 60 cars on track. I'd think TUSC teams could have figured out how to share pit stalls, especially with the yellow flag "pit by class" rules.

oh well.

also, MRLS really needs to figure out a way of getting rid of all the gravel traps. that makes simple offs multi-lap FCYs.

 

lol, like switching from Yankees/Red Sox to little league.

 

race 1 (PC/GTD) turned into a nice little race.

bummed for Flying Lizard, running out of gas within sight of the checker. too bad start/finish is uphill

I'll say it again, MRLS needs to pave all those gravel traps.

 

I'm not sure about that pass at the end of race 2 for second place. In my biased opinion the BMW punted the RSR.

 

the Porsche went in really deep and locked up before contact; hard racing IMO.

 

The Porsche was PUNTED by Auberlen

 

there was contact for sure but the Porsche wouldn't have made the corner anyway

 

60 second penalty for the Porsche for previous contact anyway...

BMW holds second, Ferrari moved up to third

 

What got me was the extremely unsafe pit release of the number 3 Corvette. That the Porsche avoided them is great but it completely screwed up their pit stop. How was there no penalty for that?

The Porsche was playing rough with the BMW. Pushed him off the track more than once. He deserved being "helped" in the last corner.

Super bummed about the Oak Racing car. The Corkscrew accident hurt what could have been an absolutely epic race.

I'm not sure what makes drivers think pushing the car beside them into the dirt is okay but there was a lot of it. I'm glad the officials were calling it.

 

you are aware that Long Beach went caution free too, yes?

I thought the split format worked well from a racing standpoint, only 2 cautions in PC/GTD race and that could have been 1 if it weren't for gravel traps; and it was nice to see some PC and GTD teams and drivers get some attention other than Patrick Dempsey

 

I liked the split format. TUSC is serious about increasing viewership, especially among Millenials. It's hard enough to keep track of four classes in one race. Add in the fact that a newbie has difficulty distinguishing the Orecas from the LMP2 cars, and you can see why this format is attractive.

Those of us who have been fans for decades may not like it, but racing needs young fans to survive.

 

that's a good point, I hadn't considered new fans.

I thought I'd hate it but it worked well. easier to follow battles. traffic wasn't a total cluster (as it was at Daytona and Sebring). you got to pay attention to things you usually don't.

to be honest I think split races would work well for everything but the 6+ hour races (NAEC), there the bigger fields make things interesting (and attrition usually whittles that down anyway)

 

It's starting to sound like the merger resulted in a great "group think" cluster where otherwise smart people and working organizations started making insane decisions that would have been prevented had they all stopped and taken a look from 20 feet away. this happens sometimes with merging cultures in organizations.

also not mentioned in the article but a possible factor is the limited number of "open sound" days at Laguna. that track has a 92 db limit most of the time and iirc only 12 or 15 days a year they can go over that, so the track limits events to 3 days. that constraint makes the daily scheduling difficult.

 

get Mark Raffauf back as the competition director

 

I think he was even less popular than the people in charge now.

 

+1000