DANVILLE, VA. – Arlington, Va. native Spencer Pumpelly set the fastest time in practice and then continued his lead-role performance by winning the pole for Sunday’s six-hour season-ending race in the Grand Sport class of the KONI Challenge series.

Pumpelly steered his Porsche 997 to a lap time of 2:04.453 at 94.590 mph to beat out Jep Thornton’s BMW M3 by just .331 second. Thornton’s time barely topped Ross Smith’s effort in a Porsche, with a difference of only five thousandths of a second. Thornton and his teammate, Jeff Segal, have the points lead going into the final race of the season. The pair lead Joe Foster by 25 points. If Thornton and Segal have a bad day Sunday and fail to finish higher than 22nd, and Foster should share the win, Foster could capture the season crown by one point, adding even more drama to the final race in the season.

DANVILLE, VA. – Patrick Dempsey, known to TV viewers as Dr. Derek Shepherd on ABC-TV’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” will be competing in the Grand-Am KONI Challenge Grand Sports Series at VIRginia International Raceway this weekend, Oct. 5-7.

Dempsey, of Los Angeles, Calif., will be co-driving the No. 54 Hyper Sport Ford Mustang GT sponsored by Supercuts, with Rick Skelton of Atlanta, Ga. and Hoover, Alabama’s Joe Middlebrooks.

DANVILLE, VA. – According to the old tales, talent and abilities flow in bloodlines. Racing talent is certainly one of those, with the Unser, Petty, Earnhardt, Gregg, Donohue, and Roush families all following one generation after another.

Yes, Roush. 32-year-old Jack Roush, Jr., son of successful team owner Jack Roush, is racing too. Not in drag racing, where his father started, but in the road racing sports car battles of KONI Challenge series, where he will be racing in the series’ season finale October 7. The six-hour endurance race for the Mustangs, Porsches, BMWs and Pontiacs of the series, will determine the season championship for both driver and manufacturer.

DANVILLE, VA. - Sports Car Vintage Racing Association's Sept. 27-30 weekend at VIR will highlight the third annual reunion for the IMSA RS/SCCA 2.5 Challenge sedans of the classic days of sedan road racing in America.

Attracting a wide range of original drivers of the series, along with the cars they drove, drivers returning to the scene of some of their earliest exploits will include Amos Johnson, Dennis Shaw, Roger Mandeville, Jerry Walsh, Jim Downing, VIR's own Lee Brantley and more. These drivers all steered their street-tired sedans around race tracks all over the nation in the 70s in pursuit of some of the earliest road racing professional championships in America.