Marco Werner held off a late charge by Butch Leitzinger to score his second consecutive win in the American Le Mans Series with co-driver JJ Lehto in Monday’s New England Grand Prix sports car race at Lime Rock Park in Lakeville, Conn. The race was the 50th event in the history of the ALMS, which started in 1999, and was the first-ever ALMS race at historic Lime Rock Park.Werner, driving the ADT Champion Racing Audi R8, beat Leitzinger’s DysonRacing Lola-MG to the finish line by 1.429 seconds after a late-race cautionperiod set up a five-minute dash to the finish in the two-hour, 45-minutetimed event. Lehto, who drove the first 45 minutes of the race, and Wernerled 105 of the race’s 165 laps, while Leitzinger and co-driver James Weaverled 59 circuits.The two cars had a back-and-forth race, with each falling a lap off thelead at separate points during the event. But the key was the next-to-lastof five caution periods in the race when Werner was able to make the Audi’sfinal pit stop under yellow shortly after Leitzinger had pitted under green.Leitzinger was able to close into striking distance near the end of the racebut Werner prevailed in the final shootout.

"That was a lot of pressure on me", said Werner. "I knew he (Leitzinger)was close for the last restart and he had been running fast. I lost a raceto that team last year like that and didn’t want it to happen again.""We got out of sequence which was in our favor for a while, but that lastyellow put us a lap down," said Leitzinger. "From then we had to crawl back.We made little dents, but it wasn’t quick enough. The #38 (Audi) got caughtin horrible traffic and from then I could judge his progress. But with thatlast yellow lasting a long time, we just didn’t have enough time to get itdone.""The race stayed close all the way to the end," said Lehto. "It was up totactics and it was a good game. It’s always nice to win. This was our firsttime here. It was nice to take it. I was so nervous at the end I didn’t knowwho was going to win."