AutoCon Motorsports signs Michael Lewis/Tomy Drissi

Michael Lewis and Tomy Drissi returning to American Le Mans Series for 2004 season.

San Diego, CA (January 8, 2004) - AutoCon Motorsports in conjunction with RPM Holdings, LLC will campaign a Riley & Scott MkIIIc in the 2004 ALMS Championship. Michael Lewis has been announced as primary driver and Tomy Drissi has signed on for a majority of the schedule as well. Lewis and Drissi ran the entire 2003 ALMS schedule as teammates for American Spirit Racing and had encouraging results for a freshman team with a top-3 qualifying effort in Miami and strong finishes in the later half of the season. A trip to Le Mans for the world famous 24-hour race is also planned for the duo.

"We certainly learned a great deal during our rookie season in ALMS," said Lewis. "The quality of competition in the LMP class was incredible. Every part of your program has to be top-shelf if you want to compete with the likes of the Joest, Champion and Panoz. Tomy and I both feel as if we have some unfinished business and look forward to returning to the best sports car series in the world".

Although new to ALMS, AutoCon Motorsports has successfully run in the Trans-Am Series for the last six years, culminating in Michael Lewis' third (3rd) place finish for the 2003 championship. The challenges of running in a new series are not lost on the veteran team but experience was gained during 2003. "It's not really new for us as we ran last year's American Spirit effort out of our shop in San Diego," explained Lewis, "so most of the personnel and equipment will be the same for 2004. It's particularly important, in my opinion, to have that continuity in effort at this level of the sport, particularly for Sebring, Le Man, and Petit. It's undoubtedly our biggest challenge yet at AutoCon, but the entire team is looking forward to building on the momentum we had late last year."

Tomy Drissi added, "Michael and I had a blast last year and are anticipating podiums this year. We're both extremely competitive personalities". As for the trip to Le Mans, Drissi continued, "It's always been a dream of mine to run Le Mans, the crown jewel of sports car racing, and I'm really happy to be making the effort to get there. We're both pumped and ready to start testing. I'm excited about the changes in this season's package. I can't wait for Sebring!"

About the Riley & Scott MrkIIIc, Lewis had this to say, "What a great little car this is! I can't say enough about how good a job Bill Riley and his boys did in turning out such a tremendous car with a fraction of the development budget the factory teams had. We definitely were interested in continuing with it, so when it became available from American Spirit Racing, AutoCon and RPM snapped it up. Just look at the run that Matthews Racing had at Le Mans last year and you can see the potential. We'd love to realize that potential this year".

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