Aasco Motorsports Ready to Ride Wave of Debut Performance to Laguna Seca Crest

ANAHEIM, Calif., April 25, 2005 � Aasco Motorsports made their 2005 Grand American Rolex Sports Car Series debut at California Speedway with a top-five finish. They enter their second race this weekend at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca riding a wave of confidence. The Road & Track 250, scheduled for Sunday, May 1, presents a unique challenge for the No. 26 New Century Mortgage Porsche 911 GT3 Cup of Porsche factory ace Patrick Long (Las Vegas, Nev.) and Pat Flanagan (Aliso Viejo, Calif.). The 2.238-mile, 11-turn facility will play host to the largest field ever assembled for a Rolex Series sprint race. The Aasco-New Century Porsche will be one of a record 30 Grand Touring (GT) class cars while another 24 Daytona Prototypes (DP) will make a 54 car field for the two hour, 45-minute race.Traffic is expected to play a key role this weekend. The large field and speed differences between the purpose-built DPs and street-based GT entries will be in clearest focus at the track's signature turn, “The Corkscrew”. The entry to the multi-story drop comes at the end of a straightaway forcing heavy braking. With the large number of cars within the two classes, that point of the track is likely to be a magnet for contact as faster cars attempt to overtake their slower counterparts. Despite the large field and challenges, confidence is at an all-time high for the Dennis Aase-owned team. A recent rule change will reduce the weight of the Porsche 911 GT3 Cup by 100 pounds. The weight reduction will strengthen the Porsche's already quick acceleration times and give them a more even playing field to fight for the GT class victory. Flanagan and Long will roll the New Century Porsche onto the Laguna Seca road course for the first time on Friday, April 29th, with qualifying set for Saturday, April 30th. The Road & Track 250 can be seen live on SPEED at 3 pm (ET), Sunday, May 1st. Live timing and scoring can be found at www.grandamerican.com. Pat Flanagan: “I am very excited about going to Laguna Seca. It is one of my favorite tracks. My first Skip Barber school was there and that experience is what got me started in sports car racing. The track is an absolute blast to drive and has a great rhythm to it with a great mix of types of corners and elevation changes. It will be an exciting race to watch. The track is wide and the layout should provide for a lot of the wheel-to-wheel racing that Grand American is known for. The car count is huge for this race so I think dealing with traffic will be the key to success in this race. We will be giving 110% and see what we have for them. The Aasco team and Patrick and I are excited and can't wait to get to the track and get after it.” Patrick Long: “It should be interesting to see 50-plus cars going around the track. There will be a lot of bottlenecks at the Corkscrew. That section will be pretty tight but the other sections should be pretty good for visibility and side-by-side racing. We can't count out the BMWs being strong. That is on our mind. Luckily, the rules break has come back in our direction. The track being shorter than Fontana, the Porsche power won't be able to shine through as much. So the weight break will help in getting on the power sooner. As the year goes on, we'll keep getting stronger. We are the spoilers because we are mixing it up with guys who are running the whole schedule. We can go out and attack it at individual races. We showed at Fontana we have a car that can win races and we'll be going for that every time we go out.”For more, please visit www.AascoMotorsports.com. To learn more about New Century Mortgage, please log on to www.NewCentury.com. ###