Subaru Road Racing Team (SRRT) drivers Andrew Aquilante and Bret Spaude are entered to compete in this weekend’s fifth round of the GRAND-AM Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge at the Lime Rock Park racing circuit scheduled Saturday at 3pm ET, as the series hits the halfway point of its 2010 road racing season.

Aquilante, of Phoenixville, Pa., and Spaude, Bushnell, Fla., a pair of 22-year olds, will race SRRT’s Impreza WRX STI, race-prepared and tuned by Phoenix Performance in Phoenixville, Pa.  Based on the core technologies found in every Subaru model, the team’s race car sports the Subaru Symmetrical AWD System as well as a horizontally-opposed 4-cylinder engine which is turbocharged in the performance-oriented WRX and STI trims levels.

“We’ve been racing a Subaru Legacy 2.5GT spec.B in the Street Tuner class at Lime Rock for the past three years and have worked up to the Grand Sports class, which is the top rung of the class ladder,” said Aquilante. “The team has been extracting a little more power from a very similar engine, but places us in a different league as far as the cars we compete against.

“Lime Rock is a personal favorite as far as tracks go. It has a long front straight where horsepower is paramount and some uphill-and-downhill twisty parts where our Subaru’s all-wheel-drive ability should give us an advantage,” he said.

“This will be Andrew’s third year of racing a Subaru at Lime Rock, but Bret’s first,” noted Joe Aquilante. “You’d think that would be a problem, but the way AJ and Bret share information and help each other, it isn’t.  Plus, Bret raced here last year in the ST class and knows the track. The two most recent rounds saw us get caught up as casualties in race crashes caused by other drivers,” he added. “Those unfortunate results have pretty much taken us out of any realistic championship aspirations, so we’re now focusing on winning individual races.”

Behind AJ and Bret, as always, are SRRT crew chief Kurt Omensetter, an 22-year veteran of Joe Aquilante’s racing programs, and multi-time professional road racing champion John Heinricy as the team’s technical director and racing-on-the-fly strategist and tactician.

Practice on the 1.53-mile layout is Friday at 11:20am and 2pm, with qualifying at 4:05pm. The race will be Saturday at 3pm for 2 ½ hours. It will be televised to air later on SPEED-TV.