Saturday, 19th April 2008

Memo Rojas puts points leaders on pole in front of rapt Mexican crowd.

That put him ahead of defending race champion Jon Fogarty's #99 GAINSCO/Bob Stallings Racing Pontiac Riley and Burt Frisselle in the #47 Doran Racing Ford Dallara. In all, ten drivers posted times faster than last year's qualifying record set by NASCAR convert Colin Braun.

In the earlier Rolex GT qualifying session, German Pierre Kaffer took the #87 Farnbacher Loles Racing Porsche GT3 to his first career pole with a time of 1min 26.621secs. Former Audi prototype driver Kaffer, who is teaming with defending Rolex Series driving champion Dirk Werner this weekend to make his second start with Farnbacher Loles, is the third driver in as many races in 2008 to score a GT pole.

“Mexico is not that easy a circuit, and this is the first time I've driven it, but I've improved during every session," the German commented, "I did a long run this morning, and felt good prior to the qualifying session. In qualifying, we had everything together, and it worked. We didn't expect to be on the pole, but the team did a very good job between yesterday and today. We improved things in the set-ups, some small things, but the important thing was to not get in traffic and use the peak of the tyres. We did a good job with that.”

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Kelly Collins, a former Mexico City 250 GT race winner, will start from the outside of the GT front row after setting a time of 1min 26.631secs in the #07 Banner Racing Pontiac GXP.R.

“It was close for the pole," the American admitted, "I was driving as hard as I could, but we have some small handling woes, and that is really the difference to being on the pole here. It is not good at all to be starting on the outside of the front row - I hope I don't get hung out on the first turn and end up going into turn three in, like, fifth.”

Rounding out the top five in GT were the #69 SpeedSource FXDD Mazda RX-8 of Jeff Segal, the #57 Stevenson Motorsports Pontiac GXP.R of Andrew Davis and the #70 SpeedSource Mazdaspeed/Castrol Syntec RX-8 of Nick Ham.

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