Baltimore, September 2, 2011.\u00a0 The inaugural Baltimore Grand Prix, to be held on the 2-mile, 12-turn streets of the City of Baltimore, opened its doors to the public today but the Risi Competizione team has not yet been able to fully appreciate its charms.<\/p>\n
Despite a creditable qualifying performance which would have placed him in sixth place on the GT grid, Jaime Melo suffered contact from the No. 45 Flying Lizard Porsche towards the end of the 15-minute session \u2013 on what would have been his fastest lap.\u00a0 This incident not only damaged the right rear tire and bodywork on his Ferrari 458 Italia, but also ultimately led to him being penalized.\u00a0 The No. 62 had its qualifying times disallowed and will therefore start the two-hour race from the back of the 30-car grid tomorrow, alongside the Porsche which was also penalized \u2013 both for \u201cunjustifiable risk\u201d.<\/p>\n
Track time was at a premium all day as the organizers struggled to complete all the necessary safety work and preparations in time to accommodate the proposed timetable.\u00a0 The Risi Ferrari and its fellow American Le Mans Series competitors had first view of the track some five hours later than originally scheduled, and the two hours of practice before qualifying was compressed to 75 minutes.<\/p>\n
Finland\u2019s Toni Vilander gave his first impressions of the new-for-2011 ALMS venue:\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s not going to be easy to race here and you\u2019re going to need luck to do well.\u00a0 There are a lot of blind corners where you might come across an accident, and you can\u2019t see what\u2019s happening.\u00a0 It\u2019s sort of like Long Beach but two or three times more difficult!<\/p>\n
\u201cThe track is wide but the apexes to corners are narrow; you need to have one line all the way to the left to make the apex before then going to the outside again.\u00a0 If you dive inside you could even end up not making the corner.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe chicane is a bit strange in the middle of the straight \u2013 you could easily cut straight through in the race (but be penalized).\u00a0 Cars tend to go side by side here even though there\u2019s only really room for single file traffic.\u00a0 The concrete stuff is really, really bumpy and I already feel sorry for the single seaters [open wheel cars]\u2013 it\u2019s maybe something we can live with, but it will be so bad for them.\u00a0 The car is bottoming out over the rail\/trolley tracks and sort of jumping which is \u2018interesting\u2019!<\/p>\n
\u201cOverall, for the first time here, I think everyone is really alert to everything that\u2019s not so good but I want to say that we should appreciate the efforts made here by the race organisation and the City of Baltimore.\u00a0 Maybe for the future it would be good to have drivers\u2019 opinions on the design of these new race tracks..that might make for an even better show.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u00a0About Risi Competizione<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Risi Competizione is a Houston-based Ferrari racing team lead by Managing Director Giuseppe Risi. Official team sponsors include Pennzoil, Motorola, Boardwalk Auto Group, Ferrari Fort Lauderdale, Ferrari of Vancouver, Ferrari Financial Services and Ferrari of Houston.<\/p>\n The next round of the American Le Mans Series presented by Tequila Patr\u00f3n will be the all new Baltimore Grand Prix, on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland on Saturday, September 3, 2011. The two-hour race runs starts at 4:30pm (ET) and will be broadcast on ABC TV from 4:00 – 6:00 PM (ET) on Sunday, September 4.\u00a0 ESPN3.com will run Qualifying Stream 2:40 – 3:55 PM (ET) on Friday, Sept 2 and the live ESPN3 Race Stream will be from 4:15 – 6:45 PM (ET).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 RIF | Miller Communications<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Baltimore, September 2, 2011.\u00a0 The inaugural Baltimore Grand Prix, to be held on the 2-mile, 12-turn streets of the City of Baltimore, opened its doors to the public today but the Risi Competizione team has not yet been able to fully appreciate its charms. Despite a creditable qualifying performance which would have placed him in …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[9],"tags":[5264,5334,2179,103,3260,5281,1750],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13593"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13593"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13594,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13593\/revisions\/13594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}