At the beginning of the 2013 Baltimore Grand Prix weekend, the Falken Tire Porsche team was looking for a three-peat victory, but after the start of the race, have found themselves well down the order in an extraordinary green flag incident that sidelined the Paul Miller and CORE Autosport GTE Porsches as well. All three Porsche GTE competitors are in the garage, not structurally sound enough to continue competition.
It is currently unclear whether the teams will be able to repair the cars sufficiently, or if they will require brand new tubs from Porsche, but they only have three weeks to turn these cars around and have them ready for the next round in Texas. Being ready for prime-time at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas will require a lot of teamwork, a lot of infrastructure, and a lot of money. As the situation develops, we will be sure to bring you more.
The Baltimore Grand Prix has been fraught with issues in the past, and this will only be another black mark on their track record. What exactly caused the crash is still uncertain, but as you can see in the video below, the Picket Racing Muscle Milk LMP1 classed car had a very slow getaway at the green, and the following LMP2 of Scott Tucker’s Level 5 Racing checked up because of it, potentially causing the resulting pile up.
As it happened, the Falken Tire Porsche, driven by Wolf Henzler, was running behind a BMW at the time. When the BMW swung wide around the slow CORE Autosports car of Tom Kimber-Smith, Henzler dove to the inside and ended up with a front bumper full of Kimber-Smith’s rear bumper. The third Porsche, the Bryce Miller driven Paul Miller Motorsports RSR was rear-ended by a Factory SRT Viper as Miller slowed in an attempt to avoid the incident altogether. Catch the video below to see it unfold for yourself.
Everyone appears to have walked away uninjured. More news will follow.
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View Comments (1)
Shame on the American LeMens leadership.
Point #1: The ALMS Baltimore race has always had its issues and it is obvious that track officials and the ALMS management are clueless. I cannot believe that each of the classes were not separated by some distance margin at the start of the race to help avoid a situations like what happened again this weekend. Losing top GT contenders in such a manner makes me no longer want to sponsor the ALMS events. Thank goodness Grand Am is taking over this series.
Point #2: The chicane before turn #1 was a total joke. The idea is to help slow the traffic, but all it did was to impede race flow. There are more intelligent ways to achieve the "slow down" results, but it is obvious that ALMS has not common sense.
Sorry to say, but if I participated in ALMS, I would seriously consider not competing in the Baltimore event in the future. I know I will no longer attend.
Professional drivers should be imbedded in the track brain-trusts so intelligent track flow can be developed.