SRT Viper won its first race last year, finished third at the Rolex 24 at Daytona and now the Bill Riley-run squad has its sights set on a championship run in 2014.

The Viper sprung to prominence with strong speed at last year’s 12 Hours of Sebring. At this week’s test, the team ran a single car with Marc Goossens and Jonathan Bomarito sharing the driving duties.

The SRT Motorsports No. 93 SRT Viper GTS-R recorded the third-fastest GTLM overall lap time of 2:00.496 across four test sessions in Thursday afternoon’s test. The lap was also the second-quickest GTLM time of that session

“It was a very positive test just from a systems point of view,” Bomarito said (pictured right)

“We had a lot of things to try – not necessarily making the car go as quick as we could. Toward the end of the day, we started putting all those pieces together and working on pace and race stuff, but we got through a lot of stuff. The guys did an awesome job.

“The car ran perfect for two days and I think we have a good race car. A couple of our competitors went pretty quick there at the end, but we’re still pretty optimistic and positive looking forward.”

“Last year in the 93 car was my first 12 Hours of Sebring. It’s a tough race. You think, ‘Oh, well 12 hours is half as long as a 24, so it should be half as hard.’ It’s equally as hard as a 24-hour race.

“It’s very physical. It’s bumpy. It’s usually pretty warm and humid and takes a toll on the man and machine, but I learned a lot as a driver what to do physically for the race. We had some bad luck here last year. We had a drive pin issue – we lost some laps and it kind of ended our race – but we pushed through and we had a good car and I feel very confident for the race coming up.”