Ride around the 12 Hours of Sebring with the GT race winner

Track to Street, Corvette Racing Series episode 2

Mobil One presents the 12 hours of 'I effing hate the French'.

If you missed it then your stupid. It's that easy. How could you miss it. I mean, granted I didn't watch all 12 Hours but everyone can at least watch a few clips. If you didn't even know it happened then get the f*** off my page.

Just kidding. The truth is though. That I am really too lazy to write up an entire recap of the 12 hour, 300+ lap race. So if you want a recap, go to AutoBlog. If  you want to hear me rant, then stay here.


I'll start it off with the ending results:

Corvette's newest ad dishes it out towards Ferrari, Porsche and BMW

Around the corner from Sebring

The Twelve Hours of Sebring is less then a week away and boy am I excited.

Sebring is one of the most difficult of endurance races. Most drivers would even label it as the number one most difficult. 

Sebring International Raceway was built on an abandoned WWII airfield. The track is made mostly out of old concrete slabs poured back during the war. Because of this, it's one of North America's oldest operating race tracks. It's rarely, if ever repaved or resurfaced so the track is just squares of concrete. Driving for 12 hours straight on this stuff will shake cars and drivers to pieces. As Alan McNish said, Sebring is like an old man, just getting more and more grumpy every year. Every year the track surface gets rougher and rougher and proves to be more and more of a challenge of driver skills and car design.

Many drivers have said something along the lines of "if you can drive for 12 hours at Sebring, you can drive for 24 hours anywhere else." This is probably true. As I pointed out earlier, the surface Sebring is no joke. To add on top of that,  the track is about 3.7 miles long, less then half the 8.469 miles of La Sarthe. With only 2 major straight aways, this makes passing much more difficult. This year, with no fewer then 57 cars on the starting grid, teams will have to pay special attention to strategy as dealing with traffic will help define the winners and the losers.

On top of all the physical challenges, it makes the race no easier with the fact that Sebring is the season opener for both Intercontinental Le Mans Series as well as American Le Mans Series. This is important because this means teams are scrambling to get the season off to a good start. Teams like Corvette need it in order to recover from a rough previous year. Audi will need it to feel out Peugeots newest diesel workhorse. Ferrari will be putting it's new 458 GT car through the paces.

Overall, it should be one hell of a race. Watching it this year will be easier then ever ALMS has signed contracts to have races broadcast on ABS, ESPN2, and even ESPN3 for all you Xbox people.

Qualifying will be on Friday at 3 PM EST and the the green flag for the 12 hours drops at 10:30 AM EST.

Live timing for practices, qualifying and races can be found on ALMS handy timing page.

New Highcroft Racing LMP-1 revealed.

Highcroft Racing has unveiled its new Honda Performance Development ARX-01e LMP1 machine - the new car which the back-to-back American Le Mans Series champions will take into battle at next week’s Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring presented by Fresh from Florida.

I wish this was my office.

Corvette Racing Season 11 - Episode 1

New Corvette Racing C6R ditches barbed wire for blades of death

Well, there it is. Not much to say but that apparently the entire Corvette world hates is because the stripes are ugly. I'm not so sure. The car is redesigned rear end with cutouts allowing trapped air to escape from behind the rear tires. Also there are remodeled front fender flares which I'm not too sure about as far as purpose goes.

Also the car's livery has got badges celebrating Chevrolet's 100th anniversary. 

What you've missed the last week that I've been too lazy/busy to write

Quite frankly the world of motorsport has been a busy place for the last week. Formula One has been hammered with the unveiling of a whole slew of new cars at Valencia for the first test session. Red Bull, Ferrari, Lotus, Sauber, Renault, Mercedes, and McLaren have unveiled their new cars. Some impressively innovative, other are keeping it quite simple.

At the end of all the practice session of Friday, the times stood like this:

1. Robert Kubica - Lotus Renault GP - 01:13.14497
2.Adrian Sutil - Force India F1 - 01:13.201117
3.Jenson Button - McLaren - 01:13.553105
4.Mark Webber - Red Bull - 01:13.936104
5.Felipe Massa - Ferrari - 01:14.01780
6.Timo Glock - Virgin Racing - 01:14.207103
7.Pastor Maldonado - Williams - 01:14.299100
8.Vitaly Petrov - Renault F1 - 01:14.458104
9.Michael Schumacher - Mercedes Grand Prix - 01:14.537110
10.Sebastien Buemi - Scuderia Toro Rosso - 01:14.80173
11.Narain Karthikeyan - HRT F1 Team - 01:16.53563
12.Jarno Trulli - Lotus F1 - 00:00.00038




Favorite team or driver not on there? Don't worry, the next test session and Jerez is 4 days down the road and there are still plenty of car unveiling's left to do.

Outside from Formula One; in the sportscar racing world, we've got winter testing going on at Sebring for Le Mans. 


Batman'w own endurance race car, Audi's R18 has been running the paces at the Florida raceway and has been reported to be as strong as ever. Audi is hoping for another successful year in the Le Mans Series.


Along with that, Peugeot has released their new 908 HDI race car. It's a completely different car and yet they still couldn't come up with a new name for it.


In the LMS GT classes, both Risi and Patron have been working on their new Ferrari 458 racers. Also BMW has been spotted with running their new M3 GT with a new front end. Not to so exciting is the news that Robertson Racing will be fielding a 2nd Ford GT race car and that Black Swan Racing will be actually competing in a whole season.

Down south, Audi Sport has kicked off the beginnings to a successful racing season with an Audi 1-2 finish at the Australian Bathurst 12 Hour's. the teams of Marc Basseng/Christopher Mies/Darryl O’Young and Mark Eddy/Craig Lowndes/Warren Luff. Both teams were running in R8 LMS'.

Lastly, there was obviously quite the race last weekend at a little place called Daytona. The Rolex Daytona 24 Hours proved to be quite the race in the end with a close finish in the last hour of racing. For the Daytona Prototype class; the finish podium is as follows:


1-Chip Genassi BMW- Hand / Pruett / Rahal / Rojas
2-Genassi BMW - Dixon / Franchitti / McMurray / Montoya 
3- Porsche Riley - Barbosa / Borcheller / Fittipaldi / France / Papis.


In the GT class at Daytona; 


1-TRG Porsche GT3 - Bertheau / Gaughan / Henzler / Lally / Pumpelly
2-Paul Miller Racing GT3 - Bell / Miller / Sellers / Sugden
3- Patrick Dempsey Racing RX-8 - Dempsey / Espenlaub / Foster / Long

Audi R18 spotted testing at Sebring

on top all these pics, if you want some awesome car pics, check out this awesome photo stream.

Source: RacerEVO