Flying Lizard Back in U.S. for Lime Rock, Round Five of ALMS Season

July 8, 2008--Lakeville, CT-- The Flying Lizard squad returns to U.S.-based racing this week, after a five-week break from the ALMS season. During the break, the Flying Lizard No. 80 Porsche completed the grueling 24 Heures du Mans in Le Mans, France, finishing sixth in GT2. Back to their ALMS three-car effort, Flying Lizard heads to the East Coast today for the Northeast Grand Prix at the newly-repaved 1.51-mile Lime Rock Park. Flying Lizard is currently leading in both the ALMS team and drivers' GT2 championships, having won two races so far this season (Sebring and the Utah Grand Prix), and secured seven of twelve possible podium spots.

At Lime Rock, Darren Law and Seth Neiman will team in the No. 44 Porsche, Joerg Bergmeister and Wolf Henzler will be back together in the No. 45 Porsche, and Johannes van Overbeek and Patrick Pilet in the No. 46 Porsche. van Overbeek, who was one of the three Lizard drivers in the No. 80 Porsche at Le Mans, reflected on being back in the ALMS. "It's always a big shift to go from the longest circuit of our season at Le Mans (more than 8 miles) to the shortest at Lime Rock. The Lizards have had success here at Lime Rock: Joerg and I won here last year and the team has had four podiums in the four years we've run here."

The Lime Rock circuit has been repaved; construction was completed just in time for this weekend's race. van Overbeek continued, "It's effectively a new track at an old venue. When major changes are made to a circuit, like repaving, it significantly changes the experience for the driver. One of the things that made Lime Rock so challenging was the bumps and the concrete patches through the corners. With the repaving, we expect many of the bumps to be gone, but we'll need to start from square one in terms of setup and getting the car dialed in for this new track. Of course, the number one thing here as a driver is managing the traffic. There is a large field and the prototypes will have a tough time passing the GT2 cars here."

With seven races still to go in the season, including several higher points races, the championship is far from confimed. Eric Ingraham, team manager and strategist on the No. 46 Porsche added, "From here on out, we need to have all three cars finish as high as possible. In the drivers' championship, it's a fairly narrow point spread among Joerg and Wolf in the lead, Tafel Racing's Dirk Mueller and Dominik Farnbacher in second, and Johannes and Patrick in third. Races like Lime Rock are very tough on the cars and the drivers: get 30 cars on such a narrow course and it's difficult to stay out of trouble, which is something we need to do considering that our next race is the following weekend."

Ingraham added, "It will be nice being back to our standard 2-hour and 45-minute race schedule. At Lime Rock it's a short weekend: we have two one-hour practice sessions on Friday, then we race on Saturday. We'll have to hustle to get to our race setup. With the number of right-handed turns on the course, our engineers run the most asymmetric setup of the season. The good news is that the laps are so short that they can make setup changes much faster than on a longer course so hopefully we'll be able to get the cars ready quickly."

Follow the Race
The 2 hour and 45 minute race begins at 2:05 p.m. (ET), Saturday, July 12, 2008. TV broadcast is on SPEED Channel, tape delayed starting at 12 pm ET, Sunday, July 13. MotorsTV will air the race live throughout Europe on Saturday, July 12. The race will be broadcast live on XM Satellite Radio Channel 144 starting at 2:00 ET, and live on American Le Mans Series Radio at www.americanlemans.com.

Flying Lizard will broadcast the team radio during the event and provide real-time race info on their race blog. For details see www.lizards.com.

About Flying Lizard Motorsports
2008 is the fifth consecutive ALMS season for the Sonoma, California-based GT2 team. Since its first year of competition in 2004, the team has finished in the top three in the ALMS GT2 team and drivers' championships, but has not yet won the GT2 title. In 2007, the team was second in the ALMS GT2 team championship and drivers Johannes van Overbeek and Joerg Bergmeister finished second in the ALMS GT2 drivers' championship.

Flying Lizard is sponsored by ShoreTel, a leading provider of enterprise IP telephony solutions, and eSilicon, a semiconductor company, both based in Sunnyvale, California. Team partners include Porsche and Michelin.

Visit the Flying Lizard website and online store at www.lizardms.com.

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