BMW finished second in last year’s debut race for the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship. It was a promising start to their season – a championship battle which unfortunately for the German manufacturer left them without a win.

For 2015, the BMW Team RLL squad is keen to make amends to get back to victory lane. Dirk Mueller and Joey Hand took the American Le Mans Series driver’s title in 2011 and BMW also won two races in the ALMS in 2012 and 2013.

In qualifying yesterday, BMW qualified fourth and seventh – John Edwards pushing the No.24 to a time of 1:43.966 and Bill Auberlen stopping the clocks at 1:44.024.

“It was a fun session. For today’s practice sessions and the race there is always so much traffic, so, even though qualifying doesn’t really matter, to go out and push without having traffic was enjoyable,” Edwards said.

“We made some progress on the car today, after we kind of struggled with it at the end of the Roar test and it helped quite a bit. We are headed in the right direction. I think we still have a few changes to make the car really drivable, especially at night, so we can be comfortable throughout the entire 24 hours.”

BMW enter 2015 with an updated driver line-up. Bill Auberlen (pictured right) has been the consistent face of BMW’s North American assault. For 2015, Auberlen will have a teammate with whom he has driven before for the first time – Dirk Werner. Since their ALMS return in 2009, Auberlen has been teamed with Joey Hand (2009), Tommy Milner (2010), Dirk Werner (2011), Jörg Müller (2012), Maxime Martin (2013) and Andy Priaulx (2014).

The second BMW will be driven by John Edwards and new recruit – seven time ALMS champion Lucas Luhr.

“We are not first, but we are not last. I feel we can definitely go racing. Our group has worked very hard during the winter and has given us a much more competitive car,” Auberlen said.

“Where you qualify here doesn’t matter. Give it a couple of hours, let everybody start to weed themselves out, and we will just claw our way slowly to the front.”