Team sitting out to work on reliability issues
By: Gary Watkins

LAT PHOTOGRAPHIC - The Muscle Milk/Pickett Racing entry will be sidelined for the next two IMSA Tudor United SportsCar Championship races.


The Muscle Milk/Pickett Racing Prototype squad has withdrawn from the next two rounds of the IMSA Tudor United SportsCar Championship.

Muscle Milk has opted to skip the Long Beach and Laguna Seca rounds on April 11 and May 4, respectively, "to focus on performance and reliability testing" with its ORECA-Nissan 03 LMP2, according to a team statement.

The move follows retirement of the car driven by Klaus Graf, Lucas Luhr and Jann Mardenborough from this month's 12 Hours of Sebring round of the championship after it was hit by transmission and then power steering issues.

Team owner Greg Pickett said, "We had an issue at Sebring with the power steering that could have been a safety concern; fortunately, it didn't get to that, but we want to make sure that we don't have such problems again.

"We received our car at the end of December and we were racing at the end of January. The team worked hard so we could be at Daytona and Sebring, but we feel that we need to take a step back in order to continue moving forward the way we want."

Pickett also said that the team would be watching the balance of performance between the Daytona Prototype and LMP2 machinery that make up the bulk of the P class in the United SportsCar Championship.

"While we did lead some laps at Sebring, the speed differential between the DP cars and the P2s is still quite big, and I want to see what the series does with that over the course of the next couple of races, because these will take place at tracks that should favor the P2 cars," he said.

Muscle Milk, which finished fifth at the 24 Hours of Daytona and was the first P2 car across the line, is planning to return to the series for the race in Detroit on May 30.