Mid-Ohio

LEXINGTON, OH July 20, 2007 – With a front row that is over three seconds quicker than last year’s P2 times, records fell across the board in American Le Mans qualifying at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car course. The two Dyson Racing Porsche RS Spyders were more than a second quicker than their best times from June testing here. They beat last year’s record P2 times by two seconds and will start fifth and ninth in a line-up that was quicker than half of today’s IndyCar field.

Butch Leitzinger will start fifth and Chris Dyson ninth. “There does not seem to be a floor in what kind of lap time we can do here: it just gets lower and lower,” commented Leitzinger. “The car feels great and the team has been doing so much work on getting a good understanding of the car. It has really been paying dividends. You saw Chris at Lime Rock and now our speed here this weekend.”

“Butch and I were talking about our one-two finish here in 2005,” said Dyson. “We had a great battle in the beginning of that race with four other cars and tomorrow could be better than that. This track is very good at bringing out a higher level of competitiveness in everybody.”

Talking about the June test here, chief engineer Peter Weston noted that they were successful in finding a good off-the-truck set up. “We are mastering the intricacies of this car’s philosophy. It is much different than the Lola we have run the past four years. At the test, we paid a lot of attention to the center spring and its different combinations. If the Lola was a 3X3 Rubik’s cube when it came to set-up permutations, the Porsche is a 6X6 Rubik’s cube. We are discovering there are more contributing factors to making this car go fast. There are so many strings to the car’s bow and we continue to find which ones will light the car up.”

The seventh race of the American Le Mans Series is scheduled for 3:15 p.m. ET tomorrow, July 21. CBS Sports will broadcast the race from 2 to 4 p.m. ET on Sunday, July 22. The race will be on XM Satellite Radio at 9 p.m. ET on Saturday and ALMS Radio will air live coverage via americanlemans.com.