IMSA: Made in Detroit: Keating brings Viper home

As the world’s number one Viper dealer, Ben Keating proudly races what he sells in the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship.While Circuit of The Americas in Austin may be the “home track” for the Texan, this weekend’s event at Belle Isle Park is the “home race” for his No. 33 ViperExchange.com Dodge Viper SRT, the lone American car currently competing in the GT Daytona (GTD) class.

“You can’t get much more Detroit than the Dodge Viper,” Keating explained. “It was conceived there, it was born there, it’s hand built there, it totally lives there all of the time. One of the things that make the Dodge Viper unique among all Detroit cars is the fact that it is hand built. We have the Viper 1 of 1 Program right now where you can literally build a car that is unique to anybody else in the world, and the only way you can do that – with over 25 million possible combinations – is with a hand-built car.“The people that are putting their hands on building those cars every single day are all based right there at Conner Avenue Assembly Plant in Detroit, which is pretty exciting,” Keating continued. “Along with that, you have all of the Dodge and SRT faithful, whether they are the person that puts in the window motor or the person that handles the ECU on the Viper, they all feel a connection to sports car racing. We are literally out there racing the production engine, the production frame, a real production-based sports car. It would be impossible to get much more Detroit than the Dodge Viper.”Keating opened the season by winning the GTD class in the Rolex 24 At Daytona in a Viper. This weekend, he will be looking to better his 10th-place finish from 2014 with Jeroen Bleekemolen in the Chevrolet Sports Car Classic presented by the Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers. “I am extremely excited to be going to the Detroit Grand Prix again,” Keating said. “I am a car dealer, I am a Dodge dealer, I am a Chevy dealer, I am a Ford dealer, I have lot of connections to the Motor City, but I have a really special connection to the Dodge Viper. We are the number one volume Viper dealer in the world at Tomball Dodge through ViperExchange.com.”Saturday’s race at Belle Isle is also the first for Detroit-based TI Automotive in its Motor City backyard, an associate sponsor for Keating’s Viper. A leading worldwide supplier of automotive fluid systems technology to the automotive industry, TI Automotive is in its first full season of a marketing and technology partnership with the ViperExchange.com/Riley Motorsports team. The GTD-class Vipers feature several TI Automotive high-performance components this year that were developed in the Detroit area. The fuel pump system engineering was done in Caro, Mich., and the driver air conditioning system development was done in Auburn Hills, Mich. In both cases, TI Automotive engineers tuned current production vehicle components to Riley specifications, a technology transfer resulting in significant weight savings and optimized engine efficiencies for more power. TI Automotive team members will be on site to cheer on the team.

Source: IMSA