Aasco Motorsports Ready to Ride Wave of Debut Performance to Laguna Seca Crest

  
ANAHEIM, Calif., April 25, 2005 - Aasco Motorsports made their 2005 Grand
American Rolex Sports Car Series debut at California Speedway with a
top-five finish. They enter their second race this weekend at Mazda Raceway
Laguna Seca riding a wave of confidence. The Road & Track 250, scheduled for
Sunday, May 1, presents a unique challenge for the No. 26 New Century
Mortgage Porsche 911 GT3 Cup of Porsche factory ace Patrick Long (Las Vegas,
Nev.) and Pat Flanagan (Aliso Viejo, Calif.). The 2.238-mile, 11-turn
facility will play host to the largest field ever assembled for a Rolex
Series sprint race. The Aasco-New Century Porsche will be one of a record 30
Grand Touring (GT) class cars while another 24 Daytona Prototypes (DP) will
make a 54 car field for the two hour, 45-minute race.

 

Traffic is expected to play a key role this weekend. The large field and
speed differences between the purpose-built DPs and street-based GT entries
will be in clearest focus at the track's signature turn, "The Corkscrew".
The entry to the multi-story drop comes at the end of a straightaway forcing
heavy braking. With the large number of cars within the two classes, that
point of the track is likely to be a magnet for contact as faster cars
attempt to overtake their slower counterparts. Despite the large field and
challenges, confidence is at an all-time high for the Dennis Aase-owned
team. A recent rule change will reduce the weight of the Porsche 911 GT3 Cup
by 100 pounds. The weight reduction will strengthen the Porsche's already
quick acceleration times and give them a more even playing field to fight
for the GT class victory. 

 

Flanagan and Long will roll the New Century Porsche onto the Laguna Seca
road course for the first time on Friday, April 29th, with qualifying set
for Saturday, April 30th. The Road & Track 250 can be seen live on SPEED at
3 pm (ET), Sunday, May 1st. Live timing and scoring can be found at
<http://www.grandamerican.com/> www.grandamerican.com. 

 

Pat Flanagan: "I am very excited about going to Laguna Seca. It is one of my
favorite tracks. My first Skip Barber school was there and that experience
is what got me started in sports car racing. The track is an absolute blast
to drive and has a great rhythm to it with a great mix of types of corners
and elevation changes. It will be an exciting race to watch. The track is
wide and the layout should provide for a lot of the wheel-to-wheel racing
that Grand American is known for. The car count is huge for this race so I
think dealing with traffic will be the key to success in this race. We will
be giving 110% and see what we have for them. The Aasco team and Patrick and
I are excited and can't wait to get to the track and get after it." 

 

Patrick Long: "It should be interesting to see 50-plus cars going around the
track. There will be a lot of bottlenecks at the Corkscrew. That section
will be pretty tight but the other sections should be pretty good for
visibility and side-by-side racing. We can't count out the BMWs being
strong. That is on our mind. Luckily, the rules break has come back in our
direction. The track being shorter than Fontana, the Porsche power won't be
able to shine through as much. So the weight break will help in getting on
the power sooner. As the year goes on, we'll keep getting stronger. We are
the spoilers because we are mixing it up with guys who are running the whole
schedule. We can go out and attack it at individual races. We showed at
Fontana we have a car that can win races and we'll be going for that every
time we go out."