GAINSCO/Bob Stallings Racing Posts P4 Qualfyting At Barber

BIRMINGHAM, April 8, 2011: GAINSCO/Bob Stallings Racing and driver Alex Gurney ran fourth fastest Thursday in opening practice for this weekend’s GRAND-AM Rolex Sports Car Series Porsche 250 where, GAINSCO, Gurney and co-driver Jon Fogarty will be seeking their third victory in five years at Barber Motorsports Park in Saturday’s race. The 2-¾-hour timed sprint race goes green at 3 p.m. local time, Saturday, April 9, and will be telecast on SPEED the next day, Sunday, April 10, at Noon ET/9 a.m. PT.

Gurney and Fogarty took turns at the wheel of the No. 99 GAINSCO Auto Insurance Chevrolet Riley, with Gurney ultimately clocking the team’s quickest lap with a time of 1:23.448 (99.223 mph) on the scenic 2.3-mile, 17-turn circuit. While the team was encouraged with a solid afternoon of work, the No. 99 was still over half a second behind the day’s top lap time.

“There’s always more there, and more of a gap to the front than we wanted, but we were sticking to our plan of trying to take care of the tires and everything,” Gurney said. “We have to find a little more speed. We did have a pretty big balance issue, and kept working on that, making small gains after the tires were not their best. We will just keep working at it.”

Barber Motorsports Park is known for being a challenge for both drivers and tires. GAINSCO and its competition spent the majority of the day working through setups that will suit the new series-standard Continental Tires.

“We have room to improve the car and we just need to figure out how to do that,” Fogarty said. “We got some good, solid running in and made some changes. It’s still anybody’s guess, really, as to how we are on the tires because we didn’t do any long runs, but so far so good. It seemed to be hanging in there and we are just going to focus on getting some better balance out of it and see where we are.”

Sharing the card this weekend at Barber with the IZOD Indy Car series, on track time for the GRAND-AM Rolex Sports Car Series is fairly limited. GAINSCO only has one more practice and a quick qualifying session, all on Friday morning, before Saturday afternoon’s race. The schedule is tight, but that may not be the team’s biggest hurdle.

“We have more track time than tires, so I don’t think that’s a big deal, we just need to find a balance,” Gurney said.

The weather, however, is one issue from past races that should not be a factor this year. Temperatures hovered in the low 70s, the sun was shining, and humidity was not existent Thursday.

“It’s gorgeous,” Fogarty said. “It seems like it is going to warm up, if we had some cloud cover that would be fantastic, but I guarantee no matter what, it is going to be nicer than it would have been if we would have been here in July and August.”

A win Saturday would go a long way in putting GAINSCO back in the 2011 championship race. The team endured a pair of disappointing showings in the first races of the year at Daytona International Speedway in January and last month at Homestead-Miami Speedway. GAINSCO overcame mechanical and contact-related issues in the season-opening Rolex 24 to finish 12th and then soldiered to eighth last month in the Grand Prix of Miami after dealing with race-long tire trouble. After winning both the Porsche 250 and the GRAND-AM Rolex Series Daytona Prototype Championships in 2007 and 2009, GAINSCO now finds itself seventh in the Daytona Prototype Team Championship standings with 42 points.