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General Motors Media Press Release

FOR RELEASE:  June 13, 2001
CONTACT(S):  Wally Reese  wareese@earthlink.net

Corvettes and Cadillac Concentrate On Improving Setup

LE MANS - General Motors’ two Le Mans teams, Corvette Racing and DAMS Team Cadillac, continued fine-tuning their respective cars’ set-ups in the second part of Wednesday’s qualifying session. The Corvette team suffered a slight setback when Canadian Ron Fellows spun off the track after a brake locked up.

“Unfortunately, it never rains but it pours,” Corvette Program Manager Doug Fehan explained. “We had a really hot set-up on the #63 car, one that Ron Fellows really liked and we were ready for some good laps. The night was perfect with cool air. For some unexplained reason, the brake on the right rear locked up as he came through the chicane and it swapped ends on him. He ended up in the tire wall with some pretty extensive damage. We will have to get the car at the end of this session and take a look at the damage. If it is just parts, we have plenty of time to fix it, but it hurt us to loose so much time in this session tonight.”

“The #64 car has a good set-up, also, but we have a little electrical problem that we are chasing,” Fehan continued. “The drivers are very happy with it and the way it is handling. We will get that worked out before tomorrow night, too.”

Next door at DAMS Team Cadillac, work continued on fine-tuning the setup of the #5 and #6 Cadillac Northstar LMPs. “We’re only working on fine tuning a few areas of our setup to get the car where we’re happy with it for the race,” said driver Christophe Tinseau. “Drivers always want the ‘perfect’ setup, which, of course, is impossible to achieve. Now we just need to decrease the lap time. We only had four hours today and will have four tomorrow, so we need to work together to get it as perfect as possible.”

“This year’s car is completely different for the driver compared to last year’s. It’s easy to drive, it has more power, a better gearbox and improved aerodynamics. We can gain a lot of time per lap and over the course of the race,” Tinseau concluded.

DAMS Team Cadillac team boss Jean-Paul Driot summed up today’s qualifying sessions as follows: “We had some good qualifying runs in both cars, but on our fastest laps, we were blocked and couldn’t take time off of our previous best. With a little luck tomorrow, we’ll show some improvement.”

QUALIFYING TIMES AT 00.00am

Related Forum:  Corvette Racing