A BITTER MEMORY OF THE SALT
LAKES
Salt
Lake City
While
France was experiencing a heat-wave, Romain Dumas had an appointment … in the desert
! The
driver from Alès in southern France set off for Salt Lake City in Utah for the
fifth round of the American Le Mans Series. Situated
right in the middle of a salt lake, in one of the driest spots in the whole of the
USA, the brand new Salt Lake City track was soon given an unanimous thumbs-up
from the drives. Long(more
than 4.5 miles in length) fast, with beautiful sweeping curves (24 corners in total)
and very safe run-off areas, the circuit did not, on paper at least, look very
favourable for the LMP2 prototypes. On the
contrary, it looked better suited to the characteristics of the Audi R10 with
its V10 diesel engine, for which this race would mark the comeback after its
success in the Sebring 12 Hours and the Le Mans 24 Hour races. In free
practice, however, Romain was pleasantly surprised to set the fastest lap time.
In qualifying, the Audi R10's finally showed their true colours. Romain's
team-mate, Timo Bernhard, set second best time, conceding the LMP2 class pole
to its sister Porsche car in the Penske team by just a few hundredths of a
second.
On
Saturday afternoon, the thermometer was reading very high over Salt Lake City
as the cars lined up for the start. Although
it was not his turn to qualify the car for this race, Romain was at the wheel
of the Porsche Spyder RS No. 7 ready for the first stint. He spent
the first 20 minutes following in the wake of the No.6 sister car, driven by Sascha
Maassen, before overtaking. After 45
minutes, Romain pulled into the pits to handover to his team-mate and after all
the pit-stops, Timo had put the car into the lead of the race, before he too
had to stop for fuel again after 1 hour and 55 minutes of racing. This
wonderful run unfortunately came to an end as Romain took to the track again. "I
rejoined the race just ahead of the other Penske car and because I was on cold
tyres and with a full load of fuel, I decide to let it pass so I wouldn't hold
it up.
I knew I
could easily overtake it later. But unfortunately, the car had a vicious understeer
and in the first corner, I went off into the dirt and then at the next corner I
went straight off the track. The
accelerator mecha- nism had been jammed by a lump of rubber from a tyre! The
mechanics found it when I finally got back to the pits. Of course,
we lost a lot of time. I got going again but then immediately after rejoining, I
had a problem with the engine, caused by the work in the pits to sort out the stuck
throttle. So that caused
a full-course yellow. I had a look under the engine cover but there wasn't much
I could do as we had by then lost so much time. It's a
shame because we were very close to another win and we've lost a lot of
precious points again in the championship".
So
Romain and his team-mate head off with a deficit of 27 points to Portland,
where they have won for the past two years in the GT2 category.
Romain DUMAS