Posted (04/13/2010) -
Team Sahlen faced a challenging weekend at GRAND-AM Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge event at Barber Motorsports Park. The team entered their #43 MAZDASPEED3 in the Wednesday Test Day. This test resulted in some very competitive times that ended very prematurely when a cut brake line saw the racer plunged nose first into the turn one wall. Fortunately the damage to the very sturdy MAZDASPEED3 was rather cosmetic. And the #43 was back on track the very next day for the start of practice. But as the weekend wore along, some mysterious handling problem surfaced that could never be quite diagnosed at the track.
Yet, Team Sahlen is never one to give up. So instead of parking the #43, the team and drivers persevered through an ill-handling race car to complete the event in 22nd position. Amazingly, Team Sahlen still beat 10 ST class cars and 11 GS class cars. With this 22nd finish, Team Sahlen is placed in 11th place in the ST Class Team Championship. And with 7 events still to go in the season, Team Sahlen still retains hope of a Top 10 finish for 2010.
“Its an unfortunate weekend, where we could have been very competitive and finished solidly in the Top 10. But instead we had to work hard and persevere for what we could get. Hopefully we can all work hard and bounce back at Virginia in 2 weeks.” – states Jay Chapman, Team Manager
The next event for Team Sahlen will be the April 24th GRAND-AM Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge event at Virginia International Raceway. The event will be televised taped delayed on May 1st at 1 pm est on SPEED TV.
The 2010 Team Sahlen ROLEX & CONTINENTAL Tires Series Campaigns will be supported by Mazda, Mazdaspeed, HRPWorld.com, HAWK Performance, Cool Shirt, Racetech Seats, BBS, Racing Print Media, Alcon, Mothers Polish, EMCO, TheRaceSite.com, Grassroots Motorsports, Holliday Canopies, Alcon, CM Racing, Genesis Technologies, Endurance Karting, Bell Helmets, Castrol, Ianetti Design, and SpeedSource Engineering.