Flying Lizard's First Take From Le Mans

June 10, 2009, 23:00 CET - Circuit de la Sarthe, Le Mans, France -- Flying Lizard had its first on-track session at Le Mans today: a six-hour practice which was run mostly on rain tires on a wet, rain-soaked track. In the No. 80 Flying Lizard Porsche, Le Mans "rookie" Darren Law completed the ten laps required for him to drive in Thursday's qualifying session, and he and teammates Joerg Bergmeister and Seth Neiman all completed their three mandatory night laps.

Law may be a Le Mans rookie, but he's no stranger to endurance racing: he's driven with the Lizards in the American Le Mans Series since 2004, and earlier this year, he won the Rolex 24 at Daytona. After his first run on the track this evening, he said, "It's an incredible experience to be here. The corners come up pretty quick: the slower corners to me are fairly standard, it's the fast stuff that's pretty tricky. There are several fast corners that will take a bit to get up to speed -- Tertre Rouge, Indianapolis, the Porsche Curves. It was a tough initiation today to have my first laps in the wet, but luckily I got a few dry ones. I've still got a lot of work to do in learning the track but I'm ready to look at some data and get back out there."

The session began under threatening skies and with a wet track, but a strong wind and some periods of sun kept the track fairly dry for Joerg Bergmeister to do an install lap, and Law to get a few laps on dry pavement. Halfway through Law's stint, the rain started to fall heavily. By the time he turned the wheel over to teammate Seth Neiman, it was clear that the rain had settled in. After Neiman's stint, Bergmeister once again took the wheel on full rain tires, for the team to work on its rain setup.

As night fell, with two hours left in the session, the drivers began their night laps, first Bergmeister, then Law, then Neiman. "The rain limited what we could achieve in terms of setup today for sure, but we found a good balance," said chief engineer Craig Watkins. "Our drivers completed their mandatory laps, and we got some data for a rain setup, which is important since there's still a chance of rain during the race. Tomorrow looks like dry weather so we'll use the qualifying sessions to complete our setup. Overall, we are happy with the car so far but we have some fine tuning to do tomorrow."

Chief strategist Thomas Blam commented on the GT2 field, "GT2 is very strong: seventeen entries: ten Ferrari 430s, five Porsche 911 GT3 RSRs, one Spyker and one Aston Martin. With the rain today, we haven't seen the true capabilities of our competition - tomorrow we'll get a better sense of where we stand."

For more information and full driver bios, see www.lizardms.com.

The 24 Heures du Mans
The 24-hour endurance race gets the green flag on Saturday June 13 at 15:00 CET. For race details, see www.lemans.org. English-language radio broadcast is available at www.radiolemans.com.

The team will broadcast their team radio during the race, starting Saturday morning for warmup. To listen, click on the "follow the race" tab at www.lizardms.com. The team will also update the blog with real-time notes from practice and during the race.

About Flying Lizard Motorsports
2009 is the sixth consecutive ALMS season for the Sonoma, California-based GT2 team. Since its first year of competition in 2004, the team has finished every year in the top three in the ALMS GT2 team and drivers' championships. Notably, in 2008, the team won both the ALMS GT2 drivers' (No. 45 Porsche of Joerg Bergmeister and Wolf Henzler) and team championships. In 2007, Flying Lizard was second in the ALMS GT2 team championship and No. 45 drivers Johannes van Overbeek and Joerg Bergmeister finished second in the ALMS GT2 drivers' championship.

Flying Lizard has also competed in the 24 Heures du Mans from 2005 through 2008, finishing third in 2005, fourth in 2006, and sixth in 2008.

Flying Lizard is sponsored in the American Le Mans Series by ShoreTel, a leading provider of enterprise IP telephony solutions and eSilicon, a semiconductor company, both based in Sunnyvale, California; and RedlineCoffee.com, a premium coffee company dedicated to motorsport enthusiasts, based in Boulder, Colorado. Team partners include Porsche and Michelin.

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