The practice run on March 13 (Thur) marked the official start of the schedule for the TUDOR United Sports Car Championship Round 2 Sebring 12 Hour race (Sebring International Raceway, FL).

Two Mazda LMP2 SKYACTIV-Ds equipped with 2.2 liter diesel turbo engines will be competing in this race. The #70 will be driven by Sylvain Tremblay, Tom Long and Ben Devlin (UK, 31 years old) who is joining the team beginning from this race. The 3 regulars, Joel Miller, Tristan Nunez and Tristan Vautier have been registered for the #07. Incidentally, Devlin has experience racing in the Dyson Racing P2 and P1 at the American Le Mans Series. He was handpicked due to his knowledge of the Mazda style and his familiarity with the roller P2 chassis. Running these two Mazda prototypes is the Florida based SpeedSource team.

In their debut race at Daytona the two cars suffered from problems such as overheating and, with only a small amount of time remaining, were unable to finish the race. In the following seven weeks the team worked on improving the vehicles, performed tests and laid the finishing touches. The aspect that received that largest improvement was the cooling to the engine bay. By making minor improvements such as increasing the size of the oil cooler and reviewing the passage of cooling liquid while improving airflow within the side pontoon, ambient temperature was lowered enabling a surplus in engine performance. Driver Joel Miller stated, “The top speed is largely unchanged from Daytona, but the acceleration up to top speed has greatly improved. This should be very effective for the technical sections of this race track.”

The official qualifier for the starting grid of the final race will be held on Friday the 14th.