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Doran Racing Makes Splash On and Off The Track
At Grand-Am Rolex Series Season Finale
Courtesy of Grand Am PR Dept

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (September 22, 2007) -- With a major off-track announcement and a strong showing on-track, Doran Racing gathered its share of attention at the Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series presented by Crown Royal Special Reserve season-ending Sunchaser 1000 at Miller Motorsports Park.

Off the track, team owner Kevin Doran sat with principals from Dallara to announce that Dallara has purchased a Grand-Am constructor's license from Doran Racing's sister company and current series chassis constructor Doran Enterprises. The agreement between the two companies includes the provision that Doran will be the official Dallara spare parts distributor and the approved repair center for its Daytona Prototypes. Doran Racing will also run a race team using the new chassis beginning in 2008. Dallara plans a limited production run for the 2008 season.

On the track, Memo Gidley started the No. 77 Doran Racing Kodak Ford Doran in sixth and finished the day with a better effort than the team's 14th-place finish suggests. He may have started in sixth, but Gidley quickly moved up to third place by the end of the first lap. He maintained third position for the first hour of the race before falling slightly off the pace and into fourth. On Lap 27 he pulled into the pits for the first driver change of the race and handed over the reins to co-driver Brad Jaeger.

"The car was great," Gidley said. "You never kind of know what you're going to do until it happens in front of you. I noticed a lot of guys going to the inside. It was a pretty clean start - everybody was pretty much side-by-side, but there was definitely a lot of fanning going on to the inside.

Jaeger jumped in the Ford-powered machine and raced off pit road and back up to 10th place. He was able to move up another position to ninth position before spinning off the track on Lap 33.

"Unfortunately, the gearbox was stuck in second when I spun around, so the engine wouldn't fire up," Jaeger said. "All it took was someone to push me a little bit to get it back into neutral and unfortunately it took three laps to get to me."

The three laps lost during the early spin may have cost the team a chance at the win, but as the first race back in a few months, Doran was satisfied and excited by his team's success over the weekend and is optimistic about the 2008 season.

"It's a great feeling just being competitive," Doran said. "We're used to winning a lot of races in Grand-Am and in sports car racing, and the last two years have been really, really lean. We've had two years without a win and prior to that we've never had a season without a winning sort of record. This is looking really cool for '08 and I think that we can be competitive."

As the only Ford-powered team running in the 2007 season, Doran Racing took some time off near the end of the season to work on getting the car back into competitive form. Part of the team working on the car included John Maddox with Roush-Yates Racing Engine Shop, who helped improve on Ford's Daytona engine.

"This one has a new cylinder head and a new manifold," Maddox said. "We ran this package in the Multimatic car in Montreal, but unfortunately they ran it through the gravel and messed up a belt, so we didn't have a lot of race time on this engine package. Now we've got an entire weekend, plus a seven-hour race on the package. That's a good test going forward towards longer races. It was good in the corners and it was good on the straightaways. It was a great test for this package."

Last weekend's race marked the end of the 2007 Rolex Series season, but if Doran Racing's performance on the track at Miller is any indication of what is to come from them in the future, look to them at the top of the charts starting at the 2008 Rolex 24 At Daytona.