It's really lame; there aren't enough manufacturers to keep the series populated with just factory drives, it's the private teems that keep it interesting with a variety of cars and coming up with ways they can get ahead when they don't have the funds to run a new set of Bridgestones every 45 minutes. Those guys busted their ass improving the Viper this offseason and then got screwed for their efforts. The restrictor knocked five seconds off their average lap.

Speed completely ignored the GT classes too, the race should have just been called the six P1 cars of Sebring. How are the private teems supposed to secure more sponsors when the coverage spends all the time on the factory drives who don't need the money.

St. Pete is going to suck, they're going to be lucky to have 18 cars on grid.

 

Yeah, I thought that was weird. Maybe they were courting Audi to try to get them to come back to the ALMS. It WAS a good race though. How good were the GT races? I saw or heard nothing about them.

 

Weren't that great, just factory porsche vs factory Ferrari with a Panoz in the mix. Of course BMW didn't have any success bitching about the performance improvements made to the Panoz during the offseason because Don Panoz started ALMS, so it's ok for that car to beat factory cars by one or two seconds even though it's a five year old design, but not any other private teams. Good crash about an hour from finish when a Flying Lizard factory Porsche tried to pass the Panoz car coming out of 17 and ended up in the wall when the two cars ran out of room as the track out narrowed.

Still wish they'd pave Sebring so we could see drivers battling each other for 12 hours instead of mechanics battling broken cars. Of the 26 cars that started, 12 didn't finish.

 

The Ford GT40 was showing decent pace during parts of the race yesterday with David murry behind the wheel. That car has come along way as well.

I was really hoping that a Acura P1 car would be on the podium. Scott dixion was doing fairly well during his stints untill the car broke.

 

i think once the flying lizard and farbacher/lowles (know i butchered the spelling) cars ended up with trouble there wasn't much of a race to show, risi was quite a bit up on everyone.

 

Good article from Joel of Primetime about ALMS screwing their Viper to make BMW happy:

AUTO-RACING - FEINBERG: Karma is a Bitch! - SPEEDtv.com

 

Oh, and how about that huge 17 car field for St. Pete, good job ALMS, maybe cut back on the bullshit and there would be more teams interested.

 

So true. ALMS' sponsor-favoritism policies are killing sports car racing. 26 cars in the great 12-hours of Sebring? 17 cars at St Pete? Pathetic, but what can you expect from an organization that allows a class (GT1) comprised of one team (GM) to continue? GT2 was the only class worth paying attention to and now it has become pathetic.

 

Short day for Primetime Viper today, tire went flat and resulted in a concrete collision. The field was really sparse without the big P1 teams, kind of boring actually since there were only two cars, Ferrari and Porsche, really dicing around with any regularity.

 

I thought about going today but got invited to the Renasiance Festival instead. I'll be eating burgers off the grill and watching the Indy race at a bud's Sunday.

How did the Indy cars sound? They are supposed to sound different this year.