While some teams have begun winding down activities ahead of the holiday season, it’s the complete opposite at West Racing Team, which is in full preparation mode for its 2011 American Le Mans Series debut.


The Indianapolis-based team took delivery of the first of its two new Lamborghini Gallardo LP560 GTs last week following a brief shakedown by Reiter Engineering, which designed and built the brand-new GT-class challenger.

“Reiter has obviously doing a very good job building the car,” Chief Operations Officer and Technical Director Brian Ma told SPEED.com. “They did a shakedown test in Europe just to make sure everything was okay before putting it on a pallet and flying it over here... We’ve fired it up here and it sounds amazing with the V10.”

It appears West Racing has already come a long ways since laying out plans in early October for a two-car Lamborghini assault in conjunction with Yokohama.

In addition to Ma, who has worked with a variety of open-wheel and sportscar outfits, the Eduardo Espindola-owned squad has also brought on board former Risi Competizione car chief Robert Midkiff as the team’s crew chief.

Progress is also accelerating on the driver front, as Ma said that three of the four full-season pilots have been confirmed, with an announcement due out by year’s end.

“Everything’s going according to plan, although slightly delayed,” Ma said. “We had hoped to originally test next week, but the car was delayed by about two weeks from delivery. We weren’t able to do everything in time.”

With West becoming the first North America-based team to campaign a GT version of Reiter’s Gallardo, it comes with some added challenges in getting the program off the ground. But nothing Ma doesn't expect them to easily overcome.

“Being the only Lamborghini in North America that’s doing this kind of racing, there’s no other resources here,” Ma said. “It all has to come from Europe. Some special tools have to come from Europe because nobody else in the U.S. has it. It presents a slight challenge to get everything into place.”

While the team’s testing program has been delayed due to the late delivery of the car, Ma confirmed they’ll be on track at Sebring for a private test on Jan. 26-28, ahead of taking part in the series’ official Winter Test on Feb. 9-10.

SOURCE: http://auto-racing.speedtv.com/artic...s-up-for-2011/

 

Pretty sweet

 

458 gt2 > ALL

 

gahhhhhhhhhhhhhh that spoiler!!!

 

holy crap thats so aggressive looking! I love it! The wing is funky but it works!