Petit Lemans on Speedvision

[albert jenab <jenab@xxxxxxx>]

Was channel surfing early last night and much to my surprise, the Petit Lemans at Road Atlanta was on.  Tom Milner's PTG M3's were kicking ass as usual until a pretty big incident happened just after dark.  The lead M3 seems to have broken something in the suspension heading into a turn at about 120 mph.  Went straight off track into the wall head on and really tore the car up.  Driver appeared to be shaken up a bit.  The replay cameras aren't exactly state of the art so it was hard to see what went wrong.  One of the other cars had broken a spindle earlier in the race so speculation was that might have happened here too.  It's a 10 hour race so fatigue is a problem.  I had to leave about 30 min before the finish so I don't know who won yet.  Milner's team was pretty much toast by then but still had at least one car running much farther back with a 911 in the lead.

There was an amazing incident earlier in the day involving one of the GT1 911 Porsches.  I have never seen anything like this before.  It was close behind another GT1 911, cresting a hill at very high speed when the front end caught some air under it.  I guess there was no downforce due to following the other car.  Anyway, the car instantly went straight up in the air and did a perfect 360+ degree backward flip about 10-15 feet off the ground, landing hard on the rear end.  Then went off-track and hit the wall hard destroying the car.  Driver was OK but still visibly shaken hours after the incident.  Totally amazing.  The Porsche engineers have a little aerodynamic work to do after that one.

The other thing that was on was the SCCA runoffs from Mid Ohio.  Only got to see the Spec racers but it was wild.  There will be more SCCA runoffs coverage on at 1:30 eastern today.  My cable company shows Speedvision intermittently and never announces what's on or when, so it's kind of hit and miss.  But they have shown all the F1 races so far.  Now I need 3 TVs, one for football, one for Talledaga, and one for Speedvision.
- -Al

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