Rookie team takes maiden victory

The win at Road Atlanta is all the more remarkable because the team was bumped to the back of the prototype section of the grid after qualifying on pole because their
Judd V10-powered Riley & Scott was found to be 3mm too long.

"It was easy for me because Eric had done all the hard work of charging up
through the field before he handed the car over," said Schiattarella.

It was Schiattarella's first win since he took victory in a Ferrari F40 at
the Vallelunga Six Hours race in Spain in 1997.

Second place went to the Doran Ferrari 333SP driven by Didier Theys and
Mauro Baldi, who came home 24.347s adrift of the Riley & Scott and behind them was the Dyson Riley & Scott MkIII of Elliott Forbes-Robinson and Butch Leitzinger.

The Dyson team had run a revised 5.3-litre Ford engine at the race, and
this almost proved to be their undoing. The first sign of trouble came when
the Andy Wallace/James Weaver car - which had been promoted to pole
position as a result of Rafanelli and Panoz's problems - was forced to
retire when the engine began to lose water.

"We discovered a leak but we could not find where the water was leaking
to," said Weaver. "It wasn't going into the cylinder or the engine. We
think it may have been leaking into the inlet port."

The Wallace/Weaver car came to a halt in the pits on lap 33. Then the
Forbes-Robinson/Leitzinger hit problems in the closing stages of the race.

"We had richened the fuel mix as a preventative measure," said Leitzinger.
"And the car would have been good for second place, but in my first stint
the engine temperature spiked and I had to pit to top-up the radiator. We
had to do that two more times and I really had to hang back over the final
laps of the race."

The race was ultimately a duel between Dyson, Doran, Doyle Risi and young
pretender Rafanelli. A 44-car grid created a lot of traffic, and all the
front-running drivers complained of being held-up.


(Full results to follow)