100th Daytona Event Awards a Second Place Finish to Forest and Dalziel

July 4, 2010

This weekend’s Brumos 250 celebrated the 100th race for the Daytona Prototype class in the Rolex Grand Am Sports Car Series. It also hosted a celebration for the #8 Corsa Car Care/Dynacor Media/Starworks Motorsport’s team as they scored a 2nd place. The team put together a herculean effort to overcome threatening weather conditions, tire issues and a Grand Am penalty assessed to DP’s running BMW engines, to take the second step on the podium.

The weekend started out under rainy conditions Friday morning in the main practice session. It was one hour into the 2 hour 30 minute session when the right rear tire came apart on the #8 car tearing up all of the surrounding body work. A similar tire issue happened to the #7 car as well as other cars as they  circulated the 320 km/h (200 mph) Daytona International Speedway on their rain tires. This forced both Starworks cars to miss out on the remainder of practice and qualifying as they had 10 hours of repair work to do, leaving only the 20 minute morning warm-up to set up the car.
Thankfully the next day was better for the Starworks team. The track was dry in the morning which gave Forest a chance to turn his first laps and begin setting up the car for the race. With such a short session Dalziel would have to wait for the race to turn his first dry-track laps.

While the race started a bit slow, Forest clawed his way from their next-to-last starting position (due to not qualifying) up to 8th before the first caution of the day came out. With the other cars heading for the pits, Forest took over the lead. Bill Riley (race strategist) then made the call to bring Forest in from his race leading position to perform their driver change.

"It was a great call on the timing of the driver change; even though we came in in the lead and Ryan [Dalziel] had to drop down to 8th, 50 seconds back we knew that after the next round of pit stops we would be in great position. Our car was impressively quick. We took a big step from warm-up to the race with the car, and we needed to! After missing the qualifying session where all the other cars got that extra session to work on their set-up, we only had the warm-up. We needed to get it right and we did!" exclaimed Forest.

Dalziel hustled the car around the track despite the 75lbs weight penalty imposed on all Dinan-BMW engines by Grand Am over a discrepancy with the Dinan-BMW engine of the #01 Ganassi car pre-race. A mid-race yellow gave the Starworks crew a chance to shine as they pitted in 8thposition and left in 4th. In the ensuing laps Dalziel took over the race lead which he held for over twenty minutes. Eventually the race lead was relinquished to the high budget team of Chip Ganassi driving the #01 car. At the end of the two and a half hours Dalziel/Forest would finish second with a 30 seconds lead over third.

"It was a great turnaround from yesterday to today. I was pushing very hard to hold off the 01 car but with all of the development time and budget the Ganassi team has at their disposal, we came up just short of our first win. We still have four races remaining and we will be challenging in each! Hats off to the Starworks crew for their repairs yesterday and the speedy pit stops today, that second stop was really quick" Dalziel said.

The second place finish vaults Dalziel back into second in the championship and Forest up into fifth, only seven points out of third overall. The next race will be in two weeks in New Jersey.