TF Sport’s No. 33 Chevy Corvette Z06 GT3.R will start a season-best fifth in LMGT3 on Sunday for the FIA World Endurance Championship’s Lone Star Le Mans at Circuit of the Americas.
Home-state hero Ben Keating put the Corvette into the top-10 after the first session, and Jonny Edgar piloted the No. 33 Z06 GT3.R to the third row in Saturday’s dual qualifying session.
The duo, plus Corvette factory driver Daniel Juncadella, will look to return to the podium in the WEC’s lone race in North America.
The trio sit third in the class Drivers Championship on the strength of a season-opening victory at Qatar. Edgar is making his COTA debut, Keating hasn’t raced a Corvette at the circuit before, and Juncadella finished in the points last year for TF Sport.
Tom Van Rompuy just missed making the Hyperpole round by 0.151 seconds in the No. 81 Corvette that he drives with Rui Andrade and Corvette factory teammate Charlie Eastwood. The trio is coming off two straight podium finishes – third at Le Mans and second place at Sāo Paulo to move up to fifth in points.
The session featured mixed conditions with intermittent rain and a drying track toward the end, allowing drivers that started their final laps close to the end of the session getting the best of it.
The six-hour Lone Star Le Mans is scheduled for 1 p.m. CT on Sunday.
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TF SPORT POST-QUALIFYING QUOTES
JONNY EDGAR, NO. 33 CHEVROLET CORVETTE Z06 GT3.R:
“I’m pretty happy with P5. It’s our best starting spot this year so that’s always good. It was a very difficult session with the already a bit of a damp track at the start and then drying throughout. Furthermore, it was pretty hard to get the tires warm. But I think we always use our tires better and the Corvette is better in the race. So yeah, we can be happy with P5 as it’s a good place to start for the race.”
BEN KEATING, NO. 33 CHEVROLET CORVETTE Z06 GT3.R:
“Really challenging conditions. Because of the Texas heat this weekend, we’re here on the hard Goodyear. In these conditions, it’s really, really difficult to get heat in the hard Goodyear on a damp track. So it was a challenging condition. Because I was getting a little bit more heat in the tire every lap, I was gaining three, four, five seconds per lap. I was just glad I didn’t end up in the gravel or in the wall somewhere.
The car was sliding all over the place, but really happy to end up in Hyperpole and super proud of Johnny to end up P5. Hyperpole for us was a big deal. The Corvette is way better on a double-stint… two hours in the car with the one set of tires. Some of the other cars turn on their tire faster than we do. I don’t care about qualifying as much as I care about the race. I’d rather have our car for the race. I think we do.”
TOM VAN ROMPUY, NO. 81 CHEVROLET CORVETTE Z06 GT3.R:
“It was a tough qualify, also with the conditions going from wet to drying. It was also really hard to judge where the limit was. I was already sliding, then also bumped into quite a bit of traffic during my run.
So yeah, not a result I was hoping for, but it is a six-hour race, so I think it we can only move up ahead. We hope to have a better day tomorrow and still end up on the podium.”
