Team GDT Signs Ryan Tveter For 2012 Star Mazda Season

Dallas, TX - Texas-based Team GDT continues its process of bbuilding a powerhouse team with today's announcement that it has signed rising American open-wheel racer Ryan Tveter for a multi-year development program beginning with the 2012 Star Mazda Championship presented by Goodyear. Also joining the championship-winning GDT squad to provide trackside engineering and career development for Tveter will be noted Canadian engineer Remi Lanteigne.

American open-wheel racer Ryan Tveter Credit: Star Mazda

Tveter, a 17 year-old from Oyster Bay, N.Y., has been impressive in extensive private testing, and has produced notable results in his first foray into the ultra-competitive world of open-wheel racing. In 2011, making his professional open-wheel racing debut, he finished 10th in a field of 44 cars in the Quebec-based Formula Tour 1600 support race at the Montreal Grand Prix. He followed that up with an 11th-place finish on the famed, and highly technical, Trois-Rivières street circuit at the GP3R in a field of 30 cars. Later that same year, making a big step up into the USF2000 National Championship powered by Mazda, he finished 8th in a field of 19 cars at the inaugural Baltimore Grand Prix.

Lanteigne, 39, from Quebec, has a wide-ranging resume in North American open-wheel racing with multiple championships and many race wins in Indy Lights, Atlantic, Formula BMW, and Star Mazda. Over the past 15 years, the list of race winning drivers who have worked with Lanteigne includes Mikael Grenier, Richard Kent, Daniel Morad and American F1 hopeful Alexander Rossi.

Tveter and Lanteigne join the previously announced pairing of rising Colombian racer Andrés Méndez and Eric Purcell, an MIT-trained engineer with more than thirty years of experience, who engineered John Edward's Star Mazda Championship-winning car in 2009.

"Competition in the Star Mazda Series is fierce and I'm looking forward to a challenging rookie year. Team GDT takes a very comprehensive approach to driver development. In exchange for commitment and hard work you get amazing resources, team facilities and a very professional staff. I'm really excited to be working with Paul, Chuck, Eric and the rest of the team. Having Remi in my camp as my lead engineer and program manager is also a huge boost. We work so well together and we're both very happy to become part of the GDT family,� says Tveter, a fourth-year student at Choate Rosemary Hall, a boarding school in Wallingford, CT, who will graduate to study mechanical engineering at Lehigh University in the fall. "Racing really is an extension of physics and math. With Team GDT and Remi supporting me, I'm confident of meeting both my own expectations and those of the sponsors who are investing in me"

Tveter's sponsors for the upcoming season, who will be announced in the coming weeks, are investing in a driver with a remarkable resume for someone so young. His education includes a Summer Oxbridge Academic Program at Cambridge University where he participated in both a physics and high-level math course titled "Mathematics and Nature," as well as a History program focusing on Espionage. He is also a certified Master Diver and Rescue Diver, a student member of the SAE International engineering society and founder of SustainableSpeed.org, a website to educate racing fans about sustainability in motorsport. However, It's not all machinery and books. Tveter is the goalie on the Choate JV hockey team and a trombonist in the Choate Jazz Ensemble. He speaks both English and French, has visited 50 countries on all seven continents and has lived in the U.S, Austria, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland.

"Ryan is a prime example of a new breed of young driver that has a unique combination of speed, intelligence and wide-ranging experience that gives him both social and business sophistication," says Team GDT owner/driver J.W. Roberts. "While he's already accomplished a lot in life, including things that bring value to the team both on and off the track, it's still very early in his racing career and the team we're building is going to have all the tools in-house - including extremely experiennced engineers for each driver - to teach him what he needs to know and get him where he wants to go."

In 2011, Team GDT won its second Expert Series championship in a row with driver/team owner J.W. Roberts. The Expert Series is a race-within-a-race and a championship-within-a-championship for drivers 30 and older. Roberts won the Expert title, driving his #65 Team GDT / General Data Tech Mazda to a total of five in-class victories. Team GDT has also had success with young drivers over the past several seasons, including Motorsport Ireland 'Young Racing Driver of the Year' Patrick McKenna and multi-race winners Alex Ardoin and Richard Kent. Tveter, and teammate Méndez, are the latest 'young hotshoes' to join the Team GDT squad, and are more announcements yet to come from the fast-growing team.

"I'm very pleased to be working with Ryan and Team GDT at this point in their evolution because I feel that I can really make a big and positive difference," says Lanteigne. "In addition to helping get the team up to the next level both competitively and commercially, I'll be working on every aspect of Ryan's career, from how his car is set up to his sponsorship and PR programs. This is a big challenge for everyone on the team and we're all very excited about 2012 and the future."

Adding to the championship mix at Team GDT for 2012 will be experienced team manager Paul Mata and driver coach and nutrition/lifestyle consultant Chuck West, a championship-winning open-wheel driver - iincluding the 1992 Star Mazda Championship -- and the original founder of the championship-winning Worldspeed Motorsports team. West's 'whole life' approach to driver training, which includes everything from fitness and nutrition to lifestyle, is credited by the team owner Roberts as a major factor in his back-to-back Expert Series championships.

"What Ryan has achieved in the short time he's been competing in open-wheel cars is very impressive, and I like his upbeat attitude," says Mata. "He's very smart, intelligently aggressive, and you can see him applying what he learns every time he's on track. He and Remi are going to make a very competitive pairing and they'll both bring great energy and results to where we're taking the team. Ryan's obvious talent, exceptional commitment and methodical, technically oriented approach to racing are what every team hopes for in a new driver."

As a part of the 2012 Mazda Road to Indy, drivers in the Star Mazda Championship presented by Goodyear are competing for a prize fund valued in excess of $1.2 million - including a $600,000 scholarship to help tthe series champion move up to the 2013 Firestone Indy Lights series. The 2012 Star Mazda Championship season begins with the series' 'Spring Training' test at Barber Motorsports Park March 19-20. The 2012 Star Mazda season-opener takes places at the Grand Prix of St. Petersburg IndyCar weekend, March 24-25.

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