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| Sebring 12 Hour Race Notes: Horag Racing |
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Horag Racing Gets Top-Five Finish in LMP2 In Saturday's Twelve Hours of Sebring
SEBRING, Fla., March 15 - The Horag Racing team got valuable experience with
its brand-new Porsche RS Spyder Saturday at Sebring International Raceway, running in the top 10 overall throughout the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring
presented by Fresh from Florida and finishing fifth in the very competitive
LMP2
class and seventh overall.
The beautiful red-and-white No. 27, which is sponsored by Lista, Making Workspace Work and Lista Office LO, ran in seventh place in the very competitive
LMP2 class most of the day. After the Andretti Green Acura overheated and dropped out the Horag team advanced to sixth in class and eighth overall at the checkered. About two hours after the race it moved up one more spot in class and overall when the second-place Acura of Lowe's Fernandez Racing didn't pass the post-race technical inspection.
Didier Theys of Scottsdale, Ariz.; Fredy Lienhard of Niederteufen, Switzerland and Jan Lammers of Katwyk, the Netherlands, handled the driving duties for the Horag Racing team, which is based in Sulgen, Switzerland. Lammers started eighth in class and 12th overall with the Michelin-shod car.
The team really only had 17 difficult minutes in the 720-minute race, completing 333 laps in the 12-hour time span. That was the same number of laps recorded by the big-buck Audi No. 2 LMP1 car of Lucas Luhr, Mike Rockenfeller and Marco Werner, which finished just one position ahead of the privateer Lista team overall.
The Horag team suffered a dash of bad luck about four hours and 33 minutes into the race when Theys spun in Turn 4, most likely due to oil on the 3.7-mile road course, and backed into a tire wall. He was able to return to the pits
on his own and the Horag Racing pit crew did a great job to get him back underway quickly, replacing the Porsche's rear wing and rear bodywork assembly and looking the suspension over very carefully before allowing him to rejoin the
field.
Theys then had a close call on the restart when Jaime Melo's Ferrari and Dirk Werner's Porsche collided while he was running with them in Turn 7. Only Theys' fast reaction time saved him from getting involved.
"We were lucky on that one," Theys said afterwards.
Theys was able to record laps after his accident that were just as fast as he had been running before it. The only thing really lost was the laps the car would have completed in those 17 minutes, as the No. 27's position was seventh in class before the contact and seventh in class after it.
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