A very wet day here at Daytona has pretty much made a mess of the festivities here and the qualifying session for the Continental Tire Sportscar Challenge is no different. The wet conditions favored the Porsche entrants, as the results indicate.
Under wet conditions, it was Hugh Plumb taking pole for the Rum Bum Porsche team. The local team took advantage of local knowledge as well track conditions that suited their Porsche 997. Hugh was able to turn a lap just over half a second faster than the new Porsche Cayman GT4 from CJ Wilson Racing.
After the session, Hugh stated, “the conditions have been constantly changing through each practice because it’s been drying, then raining, then drying. In qualifying, it was pretty much a downpour so each corner was just adapting and reacting to what was potentially coming at you. You would just keep trying to go faster, step over the boundary and learn how far you could push it. Then, you’d get to the next corner and it’d be even wetter!”
With race conditions forecast to be dry, Team manager and co-driver Matt Plumb said, “the good and the bad for tomorrow is that we’ve been here before and we have a setup that works. The bad is that we’re not quite sure where everybody else is pace wise (because of the rain), but that’s something we can’t control and we can’t worry about. We’ve just got to run our race and I’m very confident that everyone at Rum Bum Racing will do the great work that they always do.”
The wet session pretty much put a stop to the Ford try for pole. Earlier in the day, Multimatic driver Scott Maxwell indicated that he thought the Mustang would struggle in the wet. And that it did. “For whatever reason, we’ve not been able to get the GT-350 to be fast in the wet. The Boss 302 was fine, but not the 350 so far.” The race
Sadly, the GS class has been decimated entry wise. Only eight cars are entered for the 200 mile race, scheduled to take place on Friday afternoon.
On pole for the ST class is Elliott Skeer and teammate Robin Liddell. Skeer took pole in the Rebel Rock Racing Porsche Cayman, completing a Porsche sweep of poles in the series for this race.
Gary Horrocks
