Insight Racing Off to a Fast Start at Mid-Ohio

Insight Racing Off to a Fast Start at Mid-Ohio

Contact: Matt Cleary, Sunday Group Management

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Lexington, Ohio (16 September 2011) – Insight Racing was quickly up to speed in its return to GRAND-AM Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge competition as the team’s comprehensive preparation for the season finale at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course paid off when Tyler McQuarrie posted a fast lap time of 1:31.663 seconds to start seventh on the 72-car combined class grid.

The team continually improved the No. 19 BMW M3 throughout the day’s practice sessions with both McQuarrie and co-driver Martin Jensen climbing the speed charts each time out. Those efforts saw the team qualify just four tenths off the pole time to make its second best start of the season with the GS class entry.

McQuarrie will start the 2.5-hour EMCO Gears Classic from the inside of the fourth row in front of the Hilliard, Ohio-based Insight Racing team’s home crowd before handing the BMW over to Danenmark’s Jensen, who will drive to the finish.

“It’s so good coming back here,” said McQuarrie. “We’ve been off for two races and were shooting to qualify top-10 and we did even better than that. We’ve been working really hard on the set up over the last couple days. We’re down in a couple areas that we have no control of right now, but the team just did an amazing job and we finally got this set up where we can go out and drive the car. We’re only four tenths off the pole so that in itself right there is awesome. Yesterday we were sitting there a second and a half off the pace and scratching our heads, but we tried some things and the fact that we’re only four tenths off right now -we’re all really excited. The team just did flawless work this weekend.”

Insight Racing recently tested the BMW at the 2.258-mile Ohio road course and has spent the last several weeks focusing on arriving at the home race with a racecar capable of a solid result this weekend. The team will look to capitalize on the strong starting position with another good finish at the front.

“Very simply, it’s just another indication of how the engineering group and the team comes together and makes the car respond to all the work that we put into the car,” said Insight Racing Team Principal Gil Lynagh. “We think top-seven considering that we have less horsepower than anybody else, we think that’s a very good position for us to be in. We have a very raceable car for this weekend. That’s really our mantra – not really to try to be P1 in qualifying but have a car that lasts through the race, runs through the race well and is easy on the tires. We’re looking forward to tomorrow and we think the car will perform well. We brought Cooper (King) on as an engineer and now we really have an engineering triumvate if you will. I’m very happy about it and we just want to come out here tomorrow with a reasonable finish and a good solid car. It’s going to be a challenging race tomorrow – you’ve got a very large field and a tremendous number of cars for a track of this size and width. It’s definitely good to be up front and seventh is great.”

The EMCO Gears Classic is set to begin Saturday, September 17 at 11:00 AM (ET) and can be followed with live online timing and scoring at www.grand-am.com. The event will air Sunday, September 25 at 1:00 PM (ET) on SPEED.

Additional information is available at: www.insightracing.com

Insight_qual_midOhio-pdf.pdf