SALT LAKE CITY - As the American LeMans Series nears the halfway point of its 2007 season, the fledgling Rahal Letterman Racing team hopes the turn in the schedule signals a turn in the fortunes of the first-year ALMS squad.

The fifth event on the 12-race schedule will take place this weekend on the new 4.5-mile Miller Motorsports Park layout outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, marking just the second time that the ALMS cars have run on the 24-turn behemoth that is the longest track on the ALMS schedule.

Rahal Letterman Racing’s #18 BellMicro Porsche will look to use every inch of that interminable track to get back in the title chase in the GT2 class. The team of Ralf Kelleners and Tom Milner will be chasing its first top-five run of the year, coming off one of its most promising outings of the year where the Porsche 911 GT3 RSR qualified a season-best sixth in class, led laps and had a top-five run in sight before contact ended the team’s day with just 13 minutes left in the event.

Kelleners, who has 33 previous ALMS starts under his belt with 26 top-10 finishes and 12 podium results has yet to race on the new Utah layout, but is looking forward to the challenge that awaits. The team conducted a mid-season test at Road Atlanta earlier in the month, giving both drivers a reason to be optimistic heading into the race.

“We got some really needed testing in, which will definitely help us,” Kelleners said. “The team is still new to the Porsche and still has some things to learn. The Road Atlanta track should be similar to what we will see in Salt Lake and should be very helpful to us.”

21-year-old Milner will serve as the veteran in this weekend’s event as the youngster competed with Gunnar Jeannette in the GT2 event last year, running a Panoz Esperante to a seventh-place finish in class.

“Miller Motorsports Park is not an easy track to learn,” said Milner. “It takes a couple of laps to get your bearings, but once you figure it out it is a very fun track. It has a good mix of fast corners and slower, more technical parts. We made a lot of changes on the car at the Road Atlanta test and it seemed that every change we made to the car made it faster. I am looking forward to getting out there and running hard this weekend.”,

The drivers and team will have their first chance to get acquainted with the MMP layout Thursday as a nighttime test session will signal the first ALMS action of the weekend. Qualifying will take place on Friday afternoon with the race beginning at 5:05 p.m. local time on Saturday afternoon. The race will be broadcast on a tape-delayed basis on CBS, airing on Sunday afternoon, May 20, beginning at 1 p.m.

Milner and Kelleners form foundation of RLR GT2 program

A first year program leans heavily on the experience of its people and RLR’s ALMS Porsche GT2 program is no different. One of the key components for Bobby Rahal in assembling this team was to find drivers who had experience in the ALMS and in the GT2 program. Rahal paired veteran drivers Ralf Kelleners and Tom Milner to forge the foundation of his first-year team.

Kelleners, a 38-year-old native of Dinslaken, Germany, has professional sports car experience dating back to the early 90s and has driven factory entries at Le Mans for Porsche and Toyota and for Ferrari at Sebring and Daytona. Last season he split his season between ALMS for Ferrari (3rd at Sebring) a one-off run in Grand-Am and a run in the 24 Hours of Nürburgring for BMW in Germany. Kelleners is a second-generation driver whose father Helmut was a three-time European Touring Car champion.

Milner, a 21-year-old native of Washington, Virginia, joins RLR with two full seasons of sports car experience, including last season in the ALMS GT2 series when he drove for Multimatic Motorsports and posted nine top-ten results in ten races. Milner is the son of Team PTG owner, Tom Milner and has spent his entire life in racing and around the family business of racing.

“In Ralf and Tom I think we have found a combination of experience and potential that will serve as an excellent foundation for our Porsche GT2 entry,” said Rahal Letterman co-owner Bobby Rahal. “We had a lot of interest in these opportunities from drivers in ALMS and from other series. I feel strongly that in a first year program it is important to have a level of familiarity in the program with the series and the competitors. Our drivers will set the tone for our program and they will certainly have a wealth of input in our on-track efforts in 2007. Nobody at RLR is underestimating the enormity of the task that competing in GT2 will comprise.”

Rahal Letterman Racing Notes: This marks RLR’s first time racing of any kind at Miller Motorsports Park. . . RLR’s sixth place finish in its first ALMS race (Sebring) fell short of the best ever result for an RLR program in its first event. . . Danica Patrick finished third in the inaugural race for the team’s Atlantic program at Monterrey, Mexico in 2003. . . RLR’s ALMS debut came after several years of attempting to start a sports car program. Bobby Rahal, in addition to being a Hall of Fame open-wheel driver also won the 24 Hours of Daytona in 1981 and the 1987 Twelve Hours of Sebring. Rahal won both of those events while driving a Porsche. . .Graham Rahal, the 18-year-old son of Bobby Rahal, was the third driver for the RLR driver team at Sebring.