F2000 Practice Paced by Minor and Connery
Lexington, OH – As temperatures rose at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, Championship rivals Tim Minor and Kyle Connery each paced a F2000 Series practice session ahead of rounds nine and ten of the 2013 F2000 season. Minor led in the morning with a 1:24.427 while Connery, on a race simulation run, posted a lap of 1:24.546 as Minor, who has won some six races this year, battled electrical issues.
“The first session went okay,” commented Minor, who leads the Championship by 102 points. “We are fighting the same thing everyone else is, understeer. On Thursday the car cut out a few times, and out of caution we changed the fuel pump. We’re going to pull all the connections apart after the recent rain races.”
Minor was only able to turn a single lap in the afternoon session, pulling off with continued electrical issues.
That promoted Connery to nail the fastest time of the session on a hot race track as the CC Autosport driver with James Lee as his engineer was on a race simulation run.
“The first session went alright for us, there was a bit of traffic but the data shows promising results,” said Connery. “We’re right there with Minor. Right now we’re going to hang tough and we’ll see what happens. We have good data from the mock race run.”
Behind Minor on the morning time sheets was Fabio Orsolon, who ran the second fastest time of the day at 1:24.518 in the No. 77 Radon, with Santino Ferrucci, David Grant and John LaRue following. Ferrucci and Grant are in Van Diemens while LaRue is in a Citation.
Chris Livengood, in his 2013 Series debut, was sixth quick in the RFR chassis, and has two race wins at Mid-Ohio.
Jim Libecco, Joey Selmants, Connery and Sergio Pasian completed the top ten with the first nine cars separated by less than a second in the morning session.
As Connery paced the afternoon session it was HP-Tech’s Ferrucci second quick ahead of John Walko Racing’s Selmants with Orsolon for GTP Motorsports in fourth. New brake master cylinders promoted Libecco to fifth.
Livengood, Grant, Pasian, Aaron Pettipas and Federico Mosconi completed the top ten as 32 cars logged lap times.
Paul Alpsach made a late-deal to do “double-duty” racing the WISKO F2000 car alongside his usual F1600 ride for the team. In his first laps in the F2000 car in the afternoon session, Alspach was 15th. He is one of two drivers doing all the races this weekend as Steve Bamford regularly contests both Series for Rice Race Prep.
A mini-points race is on offer for all four Mid-Ohio races, with the driver amassing the most points winning the “King of the Buckeyes,” with various prizes including a dedicated trophy, custom-made commemorative poster and more going to the victor.
Practice results are available at the following link: http://www.f2000championshipseries.com/results.html
The weekend continues on Saturday and Sunday with 8:30am qualifying followed by a 1:45pm race on both days. Stay updated at f2000series.com.