Adrian Fernandez and Luis Diaz ran in the top five in the first three hours before Diaz was caught up a three-car crash. The Lowe's squad changed the entire bodywork and right rear suspension in under an hour to return to action, but another suspension part broke on lap 87 and the team was forced to retire from the event.
"On the first lap [of my stint], I had an incident that I couldn't avoid," Diaz said, "The cars in front of me touched and one of them spun. It didn't give me any room at all on the track and I made contact. Then I was hit from behind. I had quite a bit of damage to the car. We pitted and the guys did a great job to fix the car quickly. When I went back to the track, the car felt pretty decent but, unfortunately, the rear wheel came off and that ended our day.
The Sebring-winning AGR car was also a victim of crash damage, after the #20 Dyson Porsche struck Herta's mount and punctured the Acura's side radiator. The result caused the water from the engine to be lost and the AGR team's effort was finished after just 50 laps.
This is incredibly disappointing for everyone involved with the XM Satellite Radio Acura," lead driver Bryan Herta commented, "All of these guys have worked so hard to get this car ready and it's disappointing. I'll have to look at the replay of the last incident because I arrived at the brake zone and Chris Dyson was still behind me. He must have tried to out-brake me, but I never saw him and he touched me. Unfortunately it fatally damaged what was already a pretty damaged race car from my earlier get together with Jan [Magnussen]. This isn't the way we wanted this day to go.
