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Sonoma, CA - August 14, 2020 - The 2.52-mile circuit at Sonoma Raceway plays host to Round 2 of the 2020 Trans Am presented by Pirelli West Coast Championship season, August 21-23, and comes after the record breaking debut of his new XtremeGT AMG Mercedes GT3 at Thunderhill in the previous round. Simon Gregg will be looking to further explore the awesome performance potential of the car from the thoroughbred high performance AMG stable at Affalterbach, Germany.
Fresh from breaking into the top three in the Trans Am presented by Pirelli 2020 National Championship after a fine drive at Road America, Simon Gregg is making the most of every opportunity to race at the moment. The No. 59 Derhaag Motorsports AMG Mercedes Simon is running at Sonoma is a GT3 class car - legal to race all over the world - and the car has done really well in European GT Racing, including at the 24 hours of Nurburging.
The car comes from the AMG headquarters factory near Stuttgart, a real center of excellence and performance. AMG was originally known for building engines but are now the dedicated performance division of Mercedes Benz. Based on a street car, the GT3 is a factory built race car. It has fabulous aerodynamics with a wide body and ground effects to add to the downforce.
Transmission is sequential with six gears while the 6.2 litre engine produces around 500 horsepower at 7000rpm. Weighing in at around 3,000 lbs, Simon's car is a 2016 model and was built to race and compete primarily against the Porsche 911. He plans to further update his car with the evolution kit - new front fascia, body kit and wing plus updated taillights.
The first race car AMG produced was the 6.3 liter. AMG started racing around 1970 with, unbelievably, the big four door Mercedes. The 6.2 GT3 Simon drives benefits from progressive development over the years and improvements in reliability. Mercedes are also of course right at the top of the tree in Formula One and the whole company benefits from that state-of-the-art testbed. Hence this car is very fast!
The action at Sonoma gets underway with testing at 9:40 a.m. on Friday morning and then an all class practice session at 9:15 a.m. on Saturday. There will be 22 cars on the grid when the lights go green for the race itself over 40 laps at 12:45 p.m. so it promises to be a terrific spectacle. At this most challenging time, it's great that we're racing so a huge vote of thanks go out to everyone at Sonoma and all the Trans Am staff and teams making it possible.
Trans Am Series and team news about Simon Gregg can be found at gotransam.com. Keep up with Simon personally on the Simon Gregg Facebook page.
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