Krohn Racing: Homestead-Miami Post Race Report

Homesstead, march 7, 2010: Round 2 of the Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series at Homestead-Miami Speedway didn’t produce the strong results for which the Krohn Racing team had hoped. The No. 75 Krohn Racing Ford Proto-Auto Lola finished 13th overall on the 2.3-mile South Florida superspeedway. Tracy W. Krohn, car owner/driver, qualified the car 15th and drove 99 laps before turning over the 530-horsepower Prototype car to teammate Nic Jönsson. Nic took it to the checkered flag, where the Krohn team finished 13th, seven laps down from the winners.

The Grand Prix of Miami race saw Scott Pruett and Memo Rojas take the victory in their No. 01 TELMEX BMW Riley. Six drivers led the race, which only saw a single caution.

Tracy led the “Jim Trueman Award” point standings coming into the Homestead race after being honored as the top Grand-Am Pro-Am driver of the season-opening Rolex 24 At Daytona race. He narrowly missed winning today’s award, which went to Mike Forest.

DRIVER QUOTES: TRACY W. KROHN, Team Owner/Driver No. 75 Krohn Racing Ford Proto-Auto Lola: “It was a really tough race for us. We never quite got the set-up right on the car so the car drove loose the entire time. You just had to back off and do the pace with it. If you tried to do anything other than drive very conservative you paid the price for it. I think every time we come to this track we have a different sort of problem, so I’m glad to have this one behind us. I’m not disappointed in the car or my performance. Nic was his usual stellar self. We just missed the setup a little, but every time you come to a track you learn something. Hopefully we would have learned something from this and next time we’ll be a little better.”

NIC JONSSON, Driver, No. 75 Krohn Racing Ford Proto-Auto Lola: “The weekend has been a little bit up and down, I think. We struggled to get a good handling on the car. We decided for the race to trim it out as much as possible so we could at least have straight-line. Tracy got in and had a couple of unfortunate incidents in the beginning where we fell a lap or two behind. I think overall we have to look at this as a positive race. We just got back in the championship again with Tracy about a month ago with Daytona. We have to take into consideration that Tracy has actually been out of the car for almost a year with the exception of running Daytona. He took most of the year off last year and he’s just getting back into the groove again. He’s done a very good job over the winter to do go-kart practice with me and he got one step further than we have been before. He wasn’t far off the fast professional guys and we look at that as a positive. We have to take that with us and learn from the mistakes we made here and turn it around. We go to Barber (Motorsports Park) for the next race where we know this car is very good. I think this is going to be a very good season for us.”

DAVID BROWN, Krohn Racing Team Manager and Engineer: “We had a few excursions and the balance was not what we intended. We had a little too much oversteer. We have really been playing catch up with the set-up over the course of the weekend. After a good qualifying performance by Tracy, we thought we made some headway there. And we made a bit more progress in the warm-up. The car still wasn’t good enough, still wasn’t perfect for the race. We lost a couple of laps during the early part of the race. We elected to keep Tracy in the car for the maximum period to allow Nic to get points at the end. So Nic did 45 minutes and Tracy did 99 laps, in which he drove very well. Tracy’s lap times, once the race had settled down, were within 1.2 or 1.3 seconds of the quickest cars, which is very good. Overall we’ve come out having all gained experience of the car at Homestead. Tracy’s done a lot of laps in the car, driving his own car with his team and the team performed flawlessly in the pit stops. We’ll go on to Barber and have a good race there.”

The next race for Krohn Racing, partnered with Risi Competizione, will be the American Le Mans Series’ 12 Hours of Sebring on March 20th in Sebring, Florida. Tracy Krohn, Nic Jönsson and Eric van de Poele will pilot the No. 61 Risi-Krohn Ferrari 430 GTE.