SAMAX - Barber qualifying

SAMAX/ Doncaster Racing will start 11th on the GT grid for the Rolex Sports
Car Series race at Barber Motorsports Park on Sunday.

 

Greg Wilkins qualified the No. 17 SAMAX/ Doncaster Porsche 911 GT3 Cup car
with a best lap of one minute 33.644 seconds on the 2.38-mile road course.
He will drive the first race stint, followed by Dave Lacey.

 

"We went faster than we did in practice, so that was a plus, but we're not
quite on the pace yet," Wilkins said. "That's narrowed down to a couple of
places on the track. We can tell by the time on the dash, through turns 11
and 12 we're okay, but we give it back up in 13 and 14. Maybe a little bit
of aero will help tomorrow. Qualifying doesn't matter much for a three-hour
race, so we'll make sure we get a good fast car for the race."

 

business and racing

 

A tip of the helmet to MineStar Solutions and Tim Hortons, the companies
that support the SAMAX/ Doncaster program. MineStar is an integrated mining
information system that links information gathered from machines in the
field to office business enterprise systems. Tim Hortons is Canada’s largest
coffee and baked goods chain with more than 2900 stores in Canada and more
than 290 locations in the United States.

 

The SAMAX/ Doncaster drivers see many similarities between racing and their
corporate sponsors.

 

"MineStar is a subsidiary of Caterpillar that focuses on wireless data
transmission from the equipment to a central server to keep track of
performance of vehicles and try to identify malfunctions before they happen.
There's a really close link to racing in the sense that we're always trying
to stay ahead, predict failure and be able to compensate for failure
beforehand because racing requires reliability," Wilkins said.

 

"Racing is a lot like business in that it's a team sport," Lacey noted.
"That relates well to the Tim Hortons organization, which is a
franchise-based company. They need to have that team – and it's a very large
team – working together to one successful goal. There are a lot of parallels
between racing and a franchise organization like that. Everybody has a role
and responsibility, everybody has to step up and contribute to the greater
good. A franchise organization like Tims, working on all cylinders, is very
much like a race team. We set fast lap times; they get fast queue times,
people getting through for doughnuts and coffee."

 

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Sylvia Proudfoot
HYPERLINK "mailto:sylvia@spurcom.ca"sylvia@spurcom.ca
403 287 3945