Bryan Sellers' Five Card Draw at Long Beach

by Thomas Moore

Falken Tire Driver Instructs You Through the TUDOR Championship’s Best Corners

LONG BEACH, California, April 13, 2015 – Place all the cards on the table and it is the fifth one that Bryan Sellers is putting his money on for Saturday’s Tequila Patrón Sports Car Showcase at Long Beach (California). Of the 11 turns that create the Long Beach Temporary Street Course, the Braselton, Georgia-resident sees the fifth corner as the crux of the 1.968-mile wall-lined circuit that interlaces the famous streets of the ocean-side city. With limited track time for the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship teams, hitting the ground running and getting Turn Five right is critical to success in the third round of the GT Le Mans (GTLM) class title chase. In the past, the No. 17 Team Falken Tire Porsche 911 RSR has been quick at the site of the 100-minute race – the shortest on the ten-race schedule. In fact, Sellers made his first appearance driving for the Japanese tire manufacturer’s team here in 2009. A year later, longtime teammate Wolf Henzler (Germany) joined the effort and the pairing has challenged for victory every year since.

Drive Through the Long Beach Grand Prix’s Turn Five with Bryan Sellers: “Long Beach is one of the best events we attend all year. It offers the excitement and atmosphere that only a street race can have. At the same time, it has the history of one of our oldest racetracks. The most famous corner in Long Beach, and one of the most well known corners worldwide, is ‘The Hairpin’. However, if I had to pick a favorite corner at Long Beach, I have to go back earlier in the lap. To me, the most important corner on the track is Turn Five because it so difficult! It is a medium speed turn but has a lot of elements that keep you busy. The first thing it throws at you is the braking. The track is slightly off camber on the entry of the turn as you brake. This makes it difficult to have the car stable as you turn into the corner. There are big ‘baguette’ type curbing at the apex that you must make the car perform well over to be fast, and there is a massive crown in the road right at the apex the pushes the car right out to the wall. As I try to point out every week, Turn Five is a good ‘telltale’ turn. If you have a car that is fast through ‘Five’, you will generally be fast at Long Beach. That is why, for me, Turn Five is the key to the lap. Get it right and you will be fast, get it wrong and there are a lot of consequences to be paid throughout the rest of the lap.

With the limited track time, you don’t have a lot of opportunity to fine-tune the car. So, by focusing on Turn Five we can get a pretty good sense of how the No. 17 Team Falken Tire Porsche 911 RSR will qualify and race. With few passing opportunities and a short race distance, the better you can be in Turn Five right out of the box, the better your weekend usually goes at Long Beach!”

The race will take the green flag on Saturday at 4:05 p.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST)/ 7:05 p.m. EST. Fox Sports 1 will broadcast The Tequila Patrón Sports Car Showcase at Long Beach from 4-6 p.m. EST on Sunday, April 19. IMSA.com will provide audio coverage of every on-track lap, including practice and qualifying while video streaming of qualifying will be available on the IMSA web site beginning at 5:30 p.m. Friday, April 17.

For more on Bryan Sellers, please visit him on the web at "> www.BryanSellersRacing.com . Follow Bryan on Twitter ("> www.Twitter.com/BryanSellers ) and LIKE him on Facebook at: www.facebook.com/BryanSellersRacing . Tune-in to Bryan’s YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/BryanSellersRacing .

Visit www.FalkenTire.com for more on Team Falken Tire.

Learn more about the TUDOR SportsCar Championship, please visit www.IMSA.com .

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