SRT Motorsports - 24 Hours of Le Mans - Free Practice Session Quotes

“With the weather kind of coming in and out and of course (the session) getting cut short about half an hour, we were pretty happy with the cars. Just changing a few things – we had some bottoming-out issues in a couple corners. We’ll be changing some shock setups just to try to get everything balanced as well as we can.”

DO YOU HAVE ANY KIND OF STRATEGY FOR TONIGHT’S QUALIFYING PRACTICE SESSION? “This will be our first practice session with our new lighting. That will give the drivers a chance to give us some feedback on all that new lighting on the front end of the cars.”  

Tommy Kendall – No. 93 Pennzoil Ultra SRT Viper GTS-R

YOU RAN A LOT OF LAPS IN THAT PRACTICE SESSION. “I was surprised, actually, that I got that many laps in a row. The best way to sort of get in a rhythm is to do a bunch; you often don’t get that luxury. The car is decent. It’s not as good as it was at the test, so we’re trying to tweak it. We learned some things in between that we’re trying to stick with and trying to optimize before we make a decision on which direction. You know, I feel bad for Jonathan (Bomarito). He got one lap; roles were reversed like at the test when I got one dry lap at the end. He’ll start out in the night session. It’ll still be light so hopefully he’ll get his bearings. Good first session – just working through all the stuff we have to work through to get everyone comfortable. We have another compulsory thing where everybody has to do five laps in the night so we’ll try to get that out of the way first thing as soon as the night session starts and then start working.”

HOW BIG OF A FACTOR WAS THE WEATHER TODAY WITH THE RAIN AND TEMPERATURE? “Quite a bit just because it probably killed almost an hour at the start of the session. Then we got some more rain again. It definitely cut down on the running time. That seems to be the theme so far for this year (smiles) but it’s the same for everyone.”

THIS SESSION WAS CUT SHORT BY AN ACCIDENT THAT DAMAGED ONE OF THE BARRIERS ON THE COURSE. WAS THAT A BIG FACTOR? “Well just every little thing is chipping away at the time. You know we’ve got plenty to do. You never have enough time; to lose an hour and a half to weather and 45 minutes to an accident, that just starts eating away at your time. You look at that first session and it’s like ‘Oh wow it’s a four-hour session, we’re going to get tons of running’ and it gets nibbled away. But, that’s the way it goes.”