Kent’s Mike Conway heads to Florida for this week’s Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring presented by Advance Auto Parts, the second round of the 2018 WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
The 66th Twelve Hours of Sebring takes place this week with Mike Conway returning to action in the #31 Action Express Cadillac powered Whelen Engineering Racing prototype with Eric Curran and Felipe Nasr joining him in the cockpit. This week’s 12-hour endurance race features a 43-car IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship entry list and will include 16 Prototypes, nine GT Le Mans (GTLM) cars and 18 GT Daytona (GTD) entries.
The notoriously bumpy Sebring International Raceway first saw competitive racing in 1950, when the abandoned Hendricks Army Airfield in Florida hosted a six-hour race on New Year’s Eve and two years later changed to today’s ‘once around the clock’ format. In the 66 years that have followed the track has seen five layout changes to improve safety, reducing from the original 5.38-mile circuit in the 1950’s to the newest 3.74-mile layout.
Mike Conway’s last visit to Sebring last year saw him and the team recover valiantly from an early clash with a GT car to earn a third-place finish at the Twelve Hours of Sebring and his first podium of the 2017 season. This year’s IMSA campaign got off to a strong start for Mike and the #31 Whelen Engineering Cadillac as the team finished 2nd at the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona after a hard-fought race which saw the team come close to victory.
After just missing out on the top step at Daytona, Mike is hoping to go one better this weekend as the championship moves onto the second round.
“Sebring is an extremely challenging race with many factors making it a hard one to crack. The track itself is brutal and traffic is a problem, like we found out last year. But at the end of the day, the hardest tracks are the one you want to win at most so I’m heading to Sebring wanting to be on the top step!”
Track action at Sebring starts on Thursday 15th March with practice commencing proceedings. Qualifying takes place on Friday with the 66th Annual Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring Presented by Advance Auto Parts, getting started on Saturday.
Photos courtesy of Action Express Racing