Flying Lizard No. 45 Qualifies Fourth for Petit Le Mans

October 3, 2008 -- Braselton, Georgia -- Joerg Bergmeister brought the Flying Lizard No. 45 Porsche into fourth place in qualifying for Saturday's Petit Le Mans, the flagship, 1000-mile endurance race of the American Le Mans Series season. In the No. 44 Porsche, Seth Neiman will start 15th on the grid. The No. 46 Porsche of Johannes van Overbeek and Patrick Pilet, who are third in the hunt for the ALMS drivers' championship (behind Bergmeister and Wolf Henzler in the lead and Tafel Racing's Dominik Farnbacher and Dirk Mueller in second) did not qualify and will start from the rear of the grid. The No. 46 Porsche sustained heavy damage in this morning's practice session when a stuck throttle sent van Overbeek flying off track and head on into a concrete wall. van Overbeek was not injured but the car will require significant repair and will not be back on track until raceday warmup.

Bergmeister commented on the session, "I'm disappointed in our qualifying result today. It's been a tough to find our setup this week. We've been fighting a mid-corner understeer and can't shake it. This was our fastest lap of the week, and it's all we had for the session. We'll need every second of tomorrow's warmup to get things dialed in. The team has had some tough luck so far this week with both the No. 44 and the No. 46. Hopefully we've worked all of that out of our system and we can get through the rest of the weekend without any more problems."

van Overbeek added, "The good news is we can only go forward from here. It's unfortunate we had this problem but luckily it happened a day before the race, giving us the opportunity to repair it. Despite the setback, Patrick and I are optimistic for a good race tomorrow. I know the crew will work all night if need be to make the car raceworthy by race start."

Follow the Race

The Petit Le Mans gets the green flag at 11:15 am eastern time, Saturday October 4. It will be broadcast live on SpeedTV. It will run a maximum of 10 hours or 1000 miles, whichever comes first.

Visit the Flying Lizard website at www.lizardms.com to listen to the Flying Lizard team radio live on race day and read the race blog. The blog will be updated regularly during race week and offer up to the minute reports during the race. The race is also broadcast live on Radio Le Mans at www.radiolemans.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.

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