Grand-Am stars enjoy Miller moment
Drivers from the Grand-Am championship gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up to the new Miller Motorsport Park when they tested at the Utah venue this week.
The state-of-the-art facility at Tooele features an eye-popping 24 turns and is the longest road course in the United States at 4.5 miles. The track's length and the number of turns, coupled with its flat layout, proved challenging for the four Rolex Series Daytona Prototype teams in attendance.
Defending Daytona Prototype co-champions Max Angelelli and Wayne Taylor were putting their No. 10 SunTrust Pontiac Riley through its paces on Monday, as was three-time Rolex Series race winner Milka Duno in the No. 11 CITGO Racing by SAMAX Pontiac Riley, 2003 Daytona Prototype champion Terry Borcheller and co-driver Harrison Brix in the No. 77 Kodak/Sirius/Amp'd Mobile Pontiac Doran, and another three-time Rolex Series race winner, Mike Borkowski, alongside Daytona Prototype newcomer Antoine Bessette in the No. 6 Michael Shank Racing/Mears Motor Coach Lexus Riley.
"It's a great track and it's going to be an amazing facility," Borkowski said. "I think it's going to make for some of the best racing we ever see. It's pretty wide and very smooth, and there are lots of places to pass. There are probably 10 good passing spots on this track. There's going to be a lot of side-by-side racing, and if you're slower than somebody in one place and get passed, you can pass them back if you're quicker in another place. You can get lost here more than at other tracks. It's definitely a fun race track."
Miller Motorsports Park will host the 2006 Rolex Series season finale on the weekend of August 31 to September 2 with the Discount Tire Sunchaser 9-Hour. It will be the first-ever nine-hour event for the Rolex Series, and will present its own set of unique challenges. However, the drivers agree that Miller Motorsports Park is the perfect venue for such an event.
"It's a very nice place, nice facility," said Angelelli. "It doesn't look like it's in America. We have rest rooms in the pits, which is pretty unusual. It's definitely challenging, but it's also very rewarding to the driver.
"If you push to go, you are rewarded with a good lap. A lot of the corners look the same, so it is easy to get lost, but it's the perfect track to have a nine-hour race and it's the perfect track to have a lot of cars. There is a lot of runoff and it's very wide. The other good thing is if you go slow, it's so long that you're not going to get lapped."
It's a very nice place, definitely challenging, but it's also very rewarding to the driver.
Max Angelelli
"It's a great facility," Duno added. "This track is very difficult, but it's all about practice. We're slowly figuring it out. I think we are going to have a pretty busy race with nine hours, all the cars and all the corners. I really like this track. It's a lot of work, but I like the fast corners. You need to be so precise."
Borcheller is one of the busiest sports car drivers in America, and can be found in the cockpit nearly every weekend during the racing season, especially in Rolex Series and Grand-Am Cup competition. That being the case, he is well-equipped to assess Miller Motorsports Park and was definitely impressed by his first look at the facility on Monday.
"It's fun," Borcheller said. "It's got a lot of different elements to it, and there are lots of different places that remind me of others tracks. It's tough to learn instantly because you don't have a lot of reference points. It will be fun to run with a lot of other cars, and it will be interesting to see how the braking zones are. I think just because of sheer distance it's going to have some good places to pass. It's always good to have a new place to race."
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