Contact: Ed Triolo
Dick Barbour Racing
Director, Communications

Promising Start, Early Finish For Dick Barbour Racing At Donington
click here for pictures from Donington Park

Castle Donington, Derby, UK. (April 14, 2000) – At England's Donington Park, the first start for the Dick Barbour Racing Team Le Mans Prototype 675 effort showed the team's strong potential but also showed how difficult it is to go from zero to race-ready in just over five weeks.

While both Reynard and Judd did a brilliant job on super short notice and the team plotted a very, very aggressive schedule to achieve two cars ready to race by Donington, but sometimes you just can't move mountains. Just a little over a month after starting the program, only one car – the # 5 Dick Barbour Racing Reynard 01Q could be completely readied in time for the event. The sister car came close to readiness, but the team decided against running it when it became apparent that Friday's qualifying round would have been its initial shakedown test. Drivers Milka Duno and John Graham stood by as the team re-focused its efforts on the Van de Poele/de Radiguès entry.

Dick Barbour put it this way, "We came here with one overriding focus: We believe in the potential of our team for Le Mans. That also means we believe in the potential of the LMP-675 category both at Le Mans and in the ALMS. That's why we are here racing rather than testing in private, just a month after announcing the program."

Twenty-five Prototype and GT cars took the green flag just after noon under cold gray skies. All weekend long the cold weather (even by English standards) meant that drivers had a hard time getting the tires up to temperature. That made the starting laps all the more perilous.

Didier de Radiguès, who had qualified the car, started from the outside of the sixth row and held on to that 12th position for the first few laps waiting for the tire temps to get into the right range. Soon after his tires warmed, the lap times started dropping markedly and he began a move on the 675 prototype Pilbeam that had out-qualified him on Friday. Unfortunately, what should have been an easy pass down the straightaway turned dramatic as the Pilbeam veered and forced de Radiguès off --- two wheels into the grass.

De Radiguès fought back and dove inside at the Melbourne hairpin to pass the Pilbeam. Once by, he began to drive off in pursuit of the Westward Racing Panoz LMP1. It took Didier six more laps to pass Jay Cochran in the Panoz.

Not long after de Radiguès went by the clearly ill handling Panoz, he called in to the pits that he felt a severe vibration in the rear of the car. The team called him into the pits to try and trace the source of the problem. A quick look-see revealed nothing obvious and de Radiguès went out again. The engine power was still strong, but the vibration failed to go away.

Finally, the problem became so severe that de Radiguès was forced to pit and upon examination, it was found that a clutch bolt failed, causing the clutch to explode! That was the end of the race, but before the #5 Dick Barbour Reynard retired, de Radiguès set the fastest lap of the race in the LMP 675 class and validated the promise of the new category by showing that literally "out-of-the-box" the Reynard 01Q Judd was extremely quick.