PUTTING THE TEAM'S INTERESTS FIRST
R o a d A m e r i c a

After a break of four weeks, the American Le Mans Series resumed at the Road America track in Wisconsin last weekend. Considered by many as one of the most picturesque road circuits in the world, but also as one of the more dangerous, Road America hosted the seventh round of the North American championship after the recent races at Salt Lake City and Portland. It was a race greatly anticipated by Romain Dumas, even if, in contrast to some of the other circuits, it would be less possible to mix it with the LMP1 cars because of the high-speed characteristics of the Road America track.

For the first race after the mid-season break, the Penske team made a fundamental change in the driver line-up, for strategic reasons. In order to maximise their chances in the Driver's Championship, the team decided to split up Sascha Maassen and Lucas Luhr (the best placed of the two Penske driver pairings in the points standings) and place Lucas with Romain in the team's no. 7 car and transfer Timo Bernhard to drive alongside Sascha in the no. 6 Porsche. "It's a logical and professional decision on the part of Penske and Porsche in view of the team's objectives. Lucas is a very quick driver, and we both like a very similar set-up on our cars, which makes life easy. We're not quite the same build, unlike me and Timo, which has meant a few changes, but it's only a matter of detail" explained Romain.

While his new co-driver set pole position time for the LMP2 category, Romain only got in a dozen or so laps in his preparations for Round 7. The race started well for the two drivers of the no. 7 Porsche Spyder RS because after the first full-course yellow-flag neutralisation, Luhr was at the head of the pack. The German driver handed the car over to his French team-mate 70 minutes into the race, just as the Safety Car was deployed for the second time. The other drivers pulled into the pits to refuel while the yellow flags were out, which meant that the Romain, from the Gard region of France, was still in the lead when the race was restarted. It was a critical moment for Romain. "The Safety Car was pulling off into the pits and I overtook it just before it reached the cones which mark the start of the pit-lane. Road America has the longest pit entry-lane that I know of and I never dreamt for one moment of breaking the rules. I was given an immediate stop-and-go penalty which cost me about forty seconds. Then I just got stuck in and worked hard to get back into second place behind Timo in LMP2. There was another Safety Car period which allowed me to catch up again. There was 25 minutes remaining but it was wiser to be prudent and so I stayed put in second place" Romain recounted after the race. "We finished one-two and Porsche are back at the top of both the drivers' and the teams' championship. And another positive point was that our mechanics performed very well today and our strategy proved to be the correct one. I set the fastest lap of the race in our class and a new lap record for the circuit. I got on very well with my new team-mate and he's proved very quick".
The next round of the ALMS will take place in two weeks time at Bowmanville.

Romain DUMAS