Muscle Milk Aston Martin Racing came a tenth short of scoring a second consecutive pole position at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course and had to settle for a second place start for Saturday's American Le Mans Series race.
The team had topped Practice 2 heading into qualifying and had high hopes of repeating in the 15-minute qualifying session one hour later.
Things looked good early on for the Muscle Milk team as Klaus Graf set the pace on his third lap with a time of one minute 13.001 seconds. Two laps later the German went even faster, registering a lap of one minute 12.892 seconds.
Having completed his qualifying stint, Graf entered pit lane with about four minutes to go in the session.
In the meantime, the Dyson Racing car piloted by Guy Smith started closing in on the time put in by the Muscle Milk driver. It was with about two minutes left that Smith took over pole position with a lap of one minute 12.727, just over 15 hundredths of a second quicker than Graf's time.
The front row start is a fourth one for the team this season who also started second at Long Beach and Lime Rock as well as from pole at Mosport.
The Mid-Ohio Sports Car Challenge will go green at 3:30 p.m. ET on Saturday, August 6 and will also be streamed live on ESPN3.com from 3:15 p.m. ET. The race will be broadcast on ESPN2 on tape delay, Sunday, August 7 at 10:00 p.m. ET.
MUSCLE MILK QUOTES
Klaus Graf, co-driver Muscle Milk Aston Martin Racing "I think we can be pretty happy. We made a lot of progress with the Muscle Milk Aston Martin. The track is in very difficult conditions, it changes a lot and you still don't know coming around the corners if there's dirt or not. Obviously, it's the same for everybody, it's just hard to get it all perfect but we got really close. We gained a lot of speed from the last practice session and it was so close to the Dyson car."I think we have a good car for tomorrow. We made a couple of changes that will be good for the race trim and that's important. We're making another change tonight for tomorrow and we're very confident that it will help even more. Also, once the Indy cars run, the track will change again so I think we are absolutely heading in the right direction. We have to be careful here that we don't shoot ourselves in the foot, as it's easy at this place at the moment to do that with the changing track conditions."
Lucas Luhr, co-driver Muscle Milk Aston Martin Racing
"I like this track, I think it's very technical for the drivers and also for the set up of the car because you have very long slow speed corners with a big radius and then also some quick corners like Turn 1 and 11 so you need to find a good balance between high speed corners and slow speed corners."I think we're doing pretty good so far. As far as the qualifying run, we were still working on our race set up so we didn't really go for pure qualifying speed. We still have a few things to try in the warm up tomorrow morning and I'm pretty confident that they are the right things."Klaus did a great job in qualifying, and considering that we didn't really go for a qualifying set up that's pretty good so I'm looking forward to the race tomorrow."
Race Facts:Mid-Ohio Sports Car Challenge for the American Le Mans SeriesMid-Ohio Sports Car Course, 2.258-mile, 13-turn road course, Lexington, OHAug 5 - 6, 2011 - Round #5 of 9Race Duration: 2 hours and 45 minutesLive online coverage: Qualifying: ESPN3.com - August 5, 2011 - starting at 2:20 p.m. ETRace: ESPN3.com - August 6, 2011 - starting at 3:15 p.m. ETTape delayed broadcast:ESPN2: August 7, 2011 from 10:00 p.m. - midnight ETInternational broadcast:MotorsTV: Live on Saturday, August 6, 2011Fox Sports Middle East: Live on Saturday, August 6, 2011Fox Latin American Networks: Live on Saturday, August 6, 2011Rogers Sportsnet: Live on Saturday, August 6 beginning at 3:30 pm ET
Schedule (All times Eastern):Saturday, August 6, 2011:Warm up: 8:45 am - 9:10 am (All classes)Tech Talk at Muscle Milk team transporter: 11:30 amAutograph session: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pmRace: 3:30 pm - 6:15 pm (2 hours and 45 minutes)
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