BRASELTON, Georgia—Petit Le Mans is the season finale for the American Le Mans Series, but it was the visiting European teams which topped qualifying in the fastest two classes.
Neel Jani put the #12 LMP1 Rebellion Lola Toyota he shares with Andrea Bellichi and Nicolas Prost on the pole with a lap of 1:09.089 at 132.351 mph, edging out the fastest ALMS P1 team, Muscle Milk Pickett Racing, by .34 seconds.
Guy Smith in the #16 Dyson Lola-Mazda hybrid qualified 1.09 seconds off the pace, while the team car, the #20 non-hybrid Lola-Mazda driven by Grand Am ace Mark Patterson, finished 2.72 seconds down.
“We very much enjoy racing here. We like the American tracks,” Neel Janni said after qualifying. “They are not very forgiving if you go off. Also, the atmosphere, look around the track, all the spectators and the camping going on. It’s a big party which makes us enjoy racing around even that much more.
We came here with one target, win Petit Le Mans. We know qualifying is just a very small thing; the race is a totally different game. We won’t interfere with direct contact with the other cars, we'll just run our own race. We want to win, that was why we came over here.”
Rebellion wants to win the race, while the fastest ALMS P1 entries are fighting for the class championship. Muscle Milk Pickett Racing’s Klaus Graf, Lucas Luhr, and Romain Dumas will win the title if they can finish 70 percent of the race.
The Muscle Milk team won’t be trundling around trying to dodge traffic; the drivers know they have to establish their normal race rhythm to stay alert and safe. Still, as Lucas Luhr said, at Petit Le Mans theyre are times when one can go for it or not, and the team will likely choose not to more often.
Chris Dyson, Guy Smith, and Steven Kane in the #16 Dyson hybrid cannot win the championship unless the Muscle Milk HPD ARX-03a fails to finish the requisite amount of the race winner’s total—which is not out of the question, as the Muscle Milk machine has had serious issues several times this season.
Oak Is Mighty in P2
