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From Pit Lane 2007.03.27: AIM Autosport's chief mechanic, Kevin O'Reilly, reflects on the team's progress after the third race of the season, from Homestead-Miami Speedway: This is a whole new team – it's a new car to us, a new group of people. We're all trying to gel together. The guys with the experience are taking the lead and showing the aggression we need to have to keep this team at the front of the pack. We've had some good luck the past couple of races, but this race we weren't so lucky. We stumbled in the pits a little bit, but as the team gels, it will get better. I am a veteran in this series and I'm used to running in the front; I don't like running in the back. It's a very tight series – you can have 15 cars within a second of each other. To qualify ninth, with the company we race with here, was very gratifying. To see Mark in second place was outstanding! He's a fantastic driver and I'm more than happy to deal with him every day. We're more than just racers, we're friends. Burt and Brian are also fantastic. We have great engineers – Ian and Craig pull a fantastic setup for us every time. As long as they can keep the engineering side of it up, I'll do my best to keep the mechanical side. We've had some issues with the age of the car. Being an older car, we're going to run into problems that we don't expect because we have no history. We've stumbled on that at every track we've been to, but as we learn the car and add new parts, everything is getting better and better, and the drivers are getting more comfortable in the car. So it's slowly coming along to a point where we should be able to maintain a top-10 contender within this series. When we were here testing in November, the car was just a white car with AIM Autosport, nobody knew who we were. When we showed up at Daytona, we had everything all the biggest teams have – a professionally painted trailer, the car looks fantastic, it's running well and people are saying, 'Who are these Canadian guys?' We're a first-year team, we're in the top 10 in points, we've shown at every track that we can be contenders. It feels good. I'm a proud Canadian and it feels great to be down here racing against these teams.
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Established in 1995 with a mandate to identify, train and manage emerging motorsport talent AIM operates multi-car teams competing in the Formula BMW USA Championship and the Star Mazda Series North American Championship. Among those drivers who have graduated from AIM Autosport are former series and rookie champions james hinchcliffe, Andrew Ranger, Andrew Bordin, J.F.Veilleux, Jonathan Macri, L.P. Dumoulin, Anthony Simone and Dan Burchill. Other notable AIM graduates include, Sam Hornish Jr., Billy Asaro, mark wilkins, Ashley Taws, Paul Dana, Tom Dyer, Josh Schreiber, Dan McMullen and Antoine Bessette. |
