AIM Autosport Qualifies Sixth at Barber Motorsport Park

Birmingham, April 8, 2011: AIM Autosport has qualified sixth for tomorrow’s Porsche 250 at Barber Motorsports Park. Driver, Mark Wilkins, was at the wheel of the AIM Autosport BMW-Riley sponsored by GAMMA88 to set a time of 1m 22.948s around the 2.3-mile (3.7 km) road course.

While the car looked sharp yesterday with it’s eye-catching green, orange and white livery, it’s speed wasn’t so remarkable and set only the tenth-fastest time. The car was transformed today after engineers, Ian Willis and Jeff Lohman, poured over the data last night and came up with a new set up that yielded much improved performance in this morning’s practice session. Tweaks before qualifying resulted in additional improvement.

“We’ve been working hard to get the car to work better for us,” Mark said. “The Continental tire is very different from what we used previously and this is only AIM’s second race on them. We made some good changes over the course of practice and found quite a bit of time. We’re going in the right direction and we’re confident we’ll have a car to challenge our competitors in the race.”

“As usual Rolex Sport Car events are super-competitive,” said Mark’s co-driver, Burt Frisselle. “We did a great job, making progress quickly over the practice sessions, but we’re still working for more speed. I’m confident we can dial things in and run in the top three tomorrow.”

“We still have a lot to learn about what makes these tires happy,” said Chief Engineer, Ian Willis. “With each event were making gains and I’m confident we’ll be running at the front very soon.”

The Porsche 250 is a 2h 45m timed race, scheduled to begin at 4pm (ET) tomorrow. Race coverage will broadcast live on MRN radio with delayed television coverage on SPEED at noon (ET) on Sunday, April 10.