Cadillac Racing’s Cooper on Pole at Barber
First GT pole for Cooper, O’Connell to start fourth
2016-04-23
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Cadillac Racing’s Cooper on Pole at Barber
First GT pole for Cooper, O’Connell to start fourth
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Cadillac Racing driver Michael Cooper drove his No. 8 Cadillac Racing ATS-V.R Coupe to the pole position for the Pirelli World Challenge Alabama Grand Prix presented by Porsche. Cooper will start race one first with teammate O’Connell starting fourth.
Cooper (Syosset, N.Y.) was able to carry over the speed from yesterday’s final practice where he was at the top of the timing chart to today’s qualifying where he once again topped the 16 car GT field with a time of 1:22.748. The pole position is his first in the GT series and the first for Cadillac Racing in 2016. The top 14 GT cars are within one second of each other.
“I am super excited to get my first pole for Cadillac and to start up front for this afternoon’s race,” exclaimed Cooper. “Hopefully I will have a clean shot at the first few laps. The car was good today. Even though we were quickest in practice yesterday we weren’t completely satisfied. We were looking for some more performance out of the Cadillac ATS-V.R Coupe. So we sat down with the engineering team and decided to take some risks, we *Dare Greatly here at Cadillac and it paid off this morning. Last week’s strategy was to pass everybody. Strategy this week is just to GO.”
O’Connell (Flowery Branch, Ga.) will start today’s 50-minute race from the second row in fourth based upon his qualifying run of 1:22.917.
“Congratulations to Michael on an awesome lap and getting the pole for Cadillac,” said O’Connell. “This is about the manufacturer’s championship and Michael brought home some valuable points this morning. We have a tight grid here at Barber. I had a little bit more understeer than I would have liked. We will tune on it and make it better for the race. You can’t be more proud of everyone at Cadillac Racing for the job they did at Long Beach and are doing here this weekend. It is going to be an amazing race and I am looking forward to it.”
The Pirelli World Challenge series race one from Barber Motorsports Park will take the green flag at 2:45 p.m. ET. Live streaming of the event can be viewed at world-challenge.com/streamvideo/. The race will be televised Sunday, May 1 at 4 p.m. ET.
*The phrase Dare Greatly tagline is drawn from Theodore Roosevelt’s famous Citizenship in a Republic speech which is celebrating its 106th anniversary this week.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.