Rain Ends Petit Le Mans in Atlanta
Posted by Morgan Ferguson on Tue, Sep 29, 2009 @ 09:16
Rain was the story last weekend at Road Atlanta and it played a major role in determining the winner on Saturday afternoon at the Petit Le Mans race. All week the Atlanta area had experienced heavy rain as the sports cars held the annual distance race at the track just north of Atlanta. When the ALMS official decided it was just too dangerous to continue, the Peugeot team was out in front and scored a one-two victory. The officials had desperately hoped that conditions would improve enough to allow racing to resume, but they gave up waiting just after 8pm local time and waved the checkered flag. Franck Montagny and
Stephane Sarrazin took the win ahead of
Nicolas Minassian and
Pedro Lamy. The loser on the day were the Audis driven by
Allan McNish and
Dindo Capello, who lost the lead when they spun under yellow shortly before the red flag came out. The result marked the end of Audi's nine-year undefeated run in the event. The Dyson Lola-Mazda of
Marino Franchitti,
Ben Devlin and Butch Leitzinger won an LMP2 class, while Risi Ferrari's
Jaime Melo, Mika Salo and
Pierre Kaffer took GT2. Gary Bonds and his team from the Norcross, GA branch serviced the teams all week in the rain and made sure that the
SK recycling center was up and running all week.
