Roger Penske, who’d previously announced his intentions to compete in the upcoming 2009 Rolex 24 with a brace of Porsche powered Riley Daytona Prototype chassis, has now decided to contest the entire season.
Penske previously was the Porsche “Works” team in the rival American Le Mans Series, having won the LMP2 Championship the past two seasons with the RS Spyder, before deciding to move over to the Grand Am series, with the team’s announcement stating that Timo Bernhard and Romain Dumas, will be the primary driving duo of Penske’s single car entry. Thus, I’m not sure what will happen to American Porsche factory driver Patrick Long, who I’d hope to listen to his interview on the Speed Freaks show Sunday night, but I had to bail after listening to 25+ minutes of bathroom humour(?) literally... As Kenny Sergeant wanted to know the most vile place you’d ever been forced to piss, while stalling for Patrick’s interview, who was supposedly calling in from Der Fatherland at 5:20AM GMT.
On the heels of NASCAR’s announcement of banning all testing next season, the ACO has cancelled the 24 Heurs du Mans test day in order to help teams save money.
And you may already have heard, that Audi has decided to forgo full season campaigns in the ALMS and LMS racing series in 2009. And thus, Audi’s only planning to race at Sebring and Le Mans with its new R15 turbo diesel next year.
Thus, with Audi’s bailout and Porsche seemingly having left the ALMS, one must ponder whether Honda will indeed step up to the LMP1 category which it currently intends to, as they’ll be in a similar position as Audi, whom has had virtually zero competition in the class the past several years, a la Corvette in the GT1 category. So, will Gil De Ferran and Adrian Fernandez be forced to fall back to LMP2 instead?
