1 2  H o u r s  o f  S e b r i n g
HAPPY TO FINISH

 Six weeks after getting the 2007 season underway at the Daytona 24 Hours in the same state of Florida, Romain Dumas really began the main programme of his year at the famous Sebring circuit. At the outset of his second season driving for Team Penske, the driver originally from Alès in southern France could not hide his impatience to get the American Le Mans series campaign underway again. With good reason! Boosted by a heavily revised version of the Porsche RS Spyder and with the huge experience of competing in the 2006 championship, the Frenchman was also - and above all - eager to get to know the opposition. On that point, it must be said straight away that the 2007 entry list in the LMP2 category was completely different from that of the previous year.

The new season saw the arrival of three works entries from Acura (the luxury brand of Honda in the USA), cars from Mazda and two privateer Porsche RS Spyder, entered by Dyson Racing which most recently had fielded prototypes in the LMP1 class. “It will be a really exciting challenge this year. Last year we didn’t have much opposition in LMP2 but now we have some serious competition. We still hope to take the fight to the Audis in LMP1 but above all, our aim is to win the LMP2 title”, Romain declared.

Faced with such opposition, it was important not to lose a minute in measuring the Porsche’s performance against its rivals. This exercise proved very positive as Romain and his team-mates, Helio Castro Neves and Timo Bernhard, set the fastest laps in practice and improved on their best times from the previous year by two seconds! In qualifying, the German driver derived huge pleasure in setting pole time for LMP2 and the third fastest time overall. This meant that the team would start the longest race of the ALMS season in the best possible conditions.


The first part of the 12 Hour race completely lived up to all the expectations of the start of the weekend. Timo Bernhard established a solid lead at the head of LMP2 and after a double-stint by the German, Romain got behind the wheel of the No. 7 RS Spyder. Despite all the best efforts of the Honda prototypes and the other Porsches, Romain stretched their lead out to more than a minute and even led the race for several laps in front of the Audis. But then the battery had to be changed on the leading Team Penske car, which in itself should not have been such a handicap if it was an isolated problem. Romain summed up the race: “After changing the battery, next it was part of the alternator that failed and we dropped down to seventh. That got me fired up, and I set the fastest lap time of the race up to then and then Helio and Timo put their heads down and we worked our way back up again. We got back to fourth and then second in the class but then everything started going wrong again! We had to change the battery and the alternator again. So we yo-yo’ed up and down the field and we finally finished in third place in the LMP2 category, which was quite good considering all our problems. After our bad luck in 2006, I was determined to get to the finish this year, as it is so important for the rest of the championship not to fall too far behind on points at the first round.” He was equally lavish with his praise of the Penske mechanics’ work during the epic race. “We knew that this year would be very competitive but we’ve shown that we can be ahead of the Hondas, and even if Audi eventually reclaimed the fastest lap, we were particu- larly quick here. We’re leaving Florida a little bit frustrated because we did not win but we’ve got the season off to a lot better start than last year, that’s the main point”. The next round will be on 31 March at St Petersburg again in Florida.

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