Alex Job Racing drivers Bill Sweedler (Westport, Conn.), Townsend Bell (San Luis Obispo, Calif.) and Frankie Montecalvo (Highlands, N.J.), will start from the eighth row on the GTD grid for this weekend’s IMSA WeatherTech Sports Car Championship Sahlen’s Six Hours of The Glen.
Bell, who is coming off a third place class finish at Le Mans a two-weeks ago, had the controls of the No. 23 Audi R8 LMS for today’s 15-minute GTD qualifying session. Unfortunately, Bell’s session did not last long. Three laps into it, IMSA gave the No. 23 Audi a black flag. Corner workers reporting seeing a fire in the rear of the car. As a result, Bell brought the car to pit lane where the crew discovered a significant gearbox issue that ended the team’s qualifying session. Bell will start from the eighth row as a result of his 1:50.647 qualifying time.
“We’ve had a tough start to our weekend,” Bell said. “We had a bunch of issues in the first [practice] session, which limited our time. In the second session, we finally started to find our feet and we were optimistic. This morning, it was obviously wet, but the car was still good.
“Then finally [for qualifying], the sun’s out, the track is drying, and we could put everything we learned in the Friday second practice session to work. We were feeling good about things. The car was great. I was coming up to speed on a good lap and something happened in the transmission. It’s pretty terminal back there.”
“We spent Friday sorting through the set-up of the Audi,” Alex Job, team owner said. “We haven’t run the car since Sebring and Bill, Frankie and Townsend have been driving other makes over the past few months so we were all getting back into ‘Audi’ mode. In qualifying it was too bad, Townsend was feeling good about the car and then we had the issue with the transmission. We will have it ready for the race tomorrow.”
Sahlen’s Six Hours of The Glen will start at 10:10 a.m. (EDT) Sunday, July 2. Race fans watch live racing action from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on FS1. Live coverage will transition to FS2 at 1 p.m. and continue through the end of the race.
