SAMAX - Barber qualifying

SAMAX/ Doncaster Racing will start 11th on the GT grid for the Rolex Sports Car Series race at Barber Motorsports Park on Sunday.

Greg Wilkins qualified the No. 17 SAMAX/ Doncaster Porsche 911 GT3 Cup car with a best lap of one minute 33.644 seconds on the 2.38-mile road course. He will drive the first race stint, followed by Dave Lacey.

"We went faster than we did in practice, so that was a plus, but we're not quite on the pace yet," Wilkins said. "That's narrowed down to a couple of places on the track. We can tell by the time on the dash, through turns 11 and 12 we're okay, but we give it back up in 13 and 14. Maybe a little bit of aero will help tomorrow. Qualifying doesn't matter much for a three-hour race, so we'll make sure we get a good fast car for the race."

business and racing
A tip of the helmet to MineStar Solutions and Tim Hortons, the companies that support the SAMAX/ Doncaster program. MineStar is an integrated mining information system that links information gathered from machines in the field to office business enterprise systems. Tim Hortons is Canada’s largest coffee and baked goods chain with more than 2900 stores in Canada and more than 290 locations in the United States.

The SAMAX/ Doncaster drivers see many similarities between racing and their corporate sponsors.

"MineStar is a subsidiary of Caterpillar that focuses on wireless data transmission from the equipment to a central server to keep track of performance of vehicles and try to identify malfunctions before they happen. There's a really close link to racing in the sense that we're always trying to stay ahead, predict failure and be able to compensate for failure beforehand because racing requires reliability," Wilkins said.

"Racing is a lot like business in that it's a team sport," Lacey noted. "That relates well to the Tim Hortons organization, which is a franchise-based company. They need to have that team – and it's a very large team – working together to one successful goal. There are a lot of parallels between racing and a franchise organization like that. Everybody has a role and responsibility, everybody has to step up and contribute to the greater good. A franchise organization like Tims, working on all cylinders, is very much like a race team. We set fast lap times; they get fast queue times, people getting through for doughnuts and coffee."