HPD’s Berkman building Acura’s racing heritage
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| Erik Berkman |
When you’re as dedicated to and passionate about racing as Honda Performance Development and Acura, it’s hard not to accept anything other than winning. Coincidentally enough, winning is becoming more and more common for Acura which is a relief to first-year HPD president Erik Berkman.
“I’ve been a fan of American Le Mans Series racing for some time and I’m finding out just how exciting it really can be from the inside," Berkman conceded. “This year has been wonderful and I’m glad we were able to make a step forward to actually make it somewhat of a challenge and competition particularly with the Porsches."
Acura’s second-year program in the American Le Mans Series has made massive gains from a year ago. Already through seven rounds, there have been three class victories – all from David Brabham and Scott Sharp at Patr¢n Highcroft Racing – and three straight P2 pole positions from three different Acura teams.
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| Patr¢n Acura leads the XM Radio Acura |
The big carrot at the end of season is still dangling, namely the class manufacturer championship. Porsche leads Acura by 13 points with 95 possible points available over the final four races of the season.
“It sure would have been nice if at Elkhart Lake we would have finished 1-2-3 like it looked like was going to shake out! But having car out ahead and winning is what we need," Berkman said. “If we win out to the end of the year, we may end up on top. But it would be nice to put a couple of cars between ourselves and the top Porsche.
“We’re asking all our teams to come out and win. We publicized our intention of how we would use the three teams when we launched last year," he added. “This year at any given race we’ve had a situation where they all had the same spec of parts or we had a development part that was on one or two cars. And as a team, they are lustful for that development part but we don’t launch it for a couple of different reasons. More often than not it’s that it’s track-proven before we roll it out. With the launch of the de Ferran team, we struck an agreement with Gil to share right down to the setup sheets. That’s not something we had previously negotiated with the other teams. But In the future, that’s the level of sharing of information we want to see take place among our teams."