Tom Kimber-Smith made a successful return to the American Le Mans Series at Laguna Seca last weekend, scoring a third place LMP Challenge (LMPC) class finish aboard a Core Autosport ORECA FLM09. Tom and team-mate, LMPC championship leader Alex Popow, had dominated much of the race before seeing a large lead eroded away by several safety car periods which played into the hands of their rivals.
After impressing the 2011 ALMS championship-winning Core Autosport team in a recent test outing, Tom was called up to make his debut in the highly competitive LMPC ‘one-make prototype’ class, with the ALMS race also marking his first visit to the famous Laguna Seca track in California. Despite his lack of circuit knowledge, Tom was straight on the pace in the free practice sessions and then in qualifying battled it out for pole position with former IndyCar star, Bruno Junqueira. He wound up in second spot just 0.2 seconds off LMPC pole, as he and Alex lined up seventh overall just behind the LMP1 and P2 cars.
Tom then took the start of the 6-hour ‘race into the night’ on Saturday afternoon, but got blocked in by a very slow starting LMP2 machine and dropped down to fifth in class. He then fully had the bit between his teeth and picked off the cars in front, before enjoying a battle for the lead with the sister Core Autosport car of Colin Braun and team founder, Jon Bennett. Tom stayed in the car for the first three stints of the race consecutively – a total of 2 hours 50 minutes behind the wheel, and took the lead after the first round of pit stops. He then stamped his authority on the race by pulling out a full lap over the rest of the LMPC field, prior to coming in to hand over to Alex just before the half way mark. Alex was then doing a great job of holding onto the lead before several safety car periods wiped out the advantage that Tom had built up.
The Soloson Import-backed car of Popow and Kimber-Smith was still on schedule to take the win as the race entered its latter stages, but slipped back to fourth place after the final pit stop as its main class rivals elected to stretch their race strategy out, take a gamble on fuel and hope for a late-race Safety Car. Luckily for them they got one, and didn’t have to come back into the pits for a ‘splash-n-dash’ fuel stop, but Tom still managed to re-catch the front-runners and snatch third place back on the last lap, to claim the final LMPC podium spot and finish just 1.7 seconds behind the leader.
“The LMPC class is incredibly competitive,” comments Tom, “and all race I was doing qualifying-style laps…it was like a six-hour sprint race! Alex did a great job up to keep us in the hunt for the win, but the luck just didn’t go our way with the Safety Car in the end. Without that we would have certainly won the race.”
Source : Tom Kimber-Smith