Krohn Racing Post-Race Report from Barber

Birmingham, July 20, 2009: The No. 76 Krohn Racing Ford Lola of qualifying driver Nic Jönsson and Ricardo Zonta finished fifth in the Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series’ Porsche 250 race at Barber Motorsports Park on July 19th. Jönsson started from the ninth position on the grid and pitted on Lap 18 of the 109-lap race for a pit stop/driver change to Zonta. Zonta had several challenges, including a brief radio connection problem, a penalty and a rear tire puncture.

Tracy W. Krohn, Team Owner Krohn Racing: “I thought Ricardo and Nic did a great job today. I think we had a little bit of a questionable call at the start-finish. I’m learning not to comment until I’ve seen all the data and everything. But it was certainly close at best. There was a little contact at the end. We did get a quick lap in there from Ricardo. The tires just seemed to be all over the place today between the different sets. Having said all that, we ran our strategy. We had a few things we couldn’t really control but other than that, I thought the car was pretty good.”

Nic Jönsson, Driver, No. 76 Krohn Racing Ford Lola: “We didn’t qualify very well, obviously. We had a lot of difficulties to get the car balanced and qualified a disappointing ninth. For the race, we got a pretty good start up to seventh on the first lap. We were able to hang there and the first early yellow we stayed out and gained some position and were running fourth for my short stint. From a strategy standpoint, we needed to do tires, fuel and driver on the pit stop early on so we could get that out of the way. Otherwise, I had a decent stint. Tires weren’t the greatest. We also saw that later in the race with the first set of tires Ricardo ran. With the second set of tires, he said the car got completely converted. All of a sudden we had the fastest race car on the track. It’s a little bit concerning about the consistency of the different sets of tires. We’ll have to go back and look at that and see if we can figure something out with the different tires and so forth. We got a penalty today as well that I don’t think we should have had. I think from where the car ran during the weekend, I think we should be pretty happy with our finish position.”

Ricardo Zonta, Driver, No. 76 Krohn Racing Ford Lola: “My first stint was quite difficult because of the first set of tires. We kept the same set of scrubbed tires and I think they were not good. I don’t think scrubbed tires work here because we lost so much speed in the first stint. The second stint when we put new tires on, the car was very good. On the restart I was involved with car No. 09 but I think it was a wrong call against me. We lost the chance of podium because of that.”

David Brown, Team Manager/Engineer, Krohn Racing: “It was an interesting race. We certainly had the performance to finish higher than we did. We received a penalty at the restart, when Ricardo was behind the No. 09 car, which we are investigating ourselves. That put us back a bit but because of the speed of the car and the tenacity of the driver, he was able to regain the position he would have had had he overtaken that car. Two laps from the end there was contact again when another car moved over on Ricardo and he got a left rear puncture and it bent the rear wheel and damaged the body work a lot. We pitted, put a fresh set of tires on it and went around and took the flag and eventually finished fifth. We believe we should have been able to finish higher than that. The drivers did a great job driving the car. We really showed that although the performance in qualifying was not what we expected and very much below the standard we wanted that the race car was again able to be competitive. Ricardo, in fact, set fastest lap of the race. We’ll go to the next race and see if we can have a clean run and show the performance of the car and the abilities of the team."