What’s up with the Jensen team?

UPDATE This SPEEDTV.com article says that Jensen Motorsport will return for the Toronto race and run a limited schedule, with Michael Valiante as a possible driver. 05/17/05 As we understand it, Jensen Motorsport will not run at Milwaukee and their future is unclear at this time. They have their sponsor deal with Konica Minolta to do the Canadian races, but apparently a couple people who said they were going to fund them for the rest of the races (or at least a large chunk thereof) are seemingly trying to forget their pre Long Beach commitments.

With that said, things are actually looking very bright for the team's future. They have some good new big brand marketers who they are working with, the big decisions is just going to be in what direction they take the team and their programs

Their Formula BMW team is racing this weekend at Mid-Ohio and they really want their youngsters to win at least one of those races this weekend. They were fast enough at Laguna to do so, but they just made rookie mistakes and didn't get it done. Eric Jensen puts a lot into helping develop some young talent, and he wants to see that through to them winning races

Jensen sent two of his crew to run Adam Pecorari in the team's Toyota Atlantic car this weekend at Monterrey Mexico. Adam did very well last year in the seat at Montreal and Laguna Seca (able to run ahead of Danica Patrick and Ryan Dalziel in the race, and when he retired he had the 4th fastest race lap) so Eric figures he's got the goods to win. Eric can't be there as he will be at the Monaco GP schmoozing with potential sponsors.

Since the team has a bigger staff now with the ChampCar team, it's easy to allocate guys in different directions, but of course the Champ Car requires all their best guys, which would have caused a major problem for this weekend since Eric was not going to compromise his 4-car Formula BMW program since those kids have a good shot of winning at Mid-Ohio this weekend (plus the championship if they can rebound from the problems they had in Laguna (i.e. – Herrington crashed trying to pass the polesitter on the race start). Mark C.