THE LINE
Monday, October 22, 2012 at 10:19AM October 24, 2012
(John Thawley ~ Motorsports Photography @ www.johnthawley.com ~ 248.227.0110)
Rebellion Racing’s Neel Jani, Andrea Belicchi and Nicolas Prost (above) won the 1,000-mile Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta for the first time with a three-lap victory in their Lola B12/60 Toyota. Lucas Luhr and Klaus Graf (No. 6 Muscle Milk Racing HPD ARX-03a Honda) finished third in class and way down in the field but completed enough laps to sew up both the P1 drivers’ and team championship in the American Le Mans Series presented by Tequila Patrón. A crash in the first hour put paid to the duo's chances of challenging for the overall win.
The No. 01 Extreme Speed Motorsports Ferrari F458 Italia driven by Scott Sharp, Johannes van Overbeek and Toni Vilander, sporting its new chrome Ultimat Vodka livery, won the GT category from pole position, but it was the usual GT dogfight. The ESM crew was challenged early on by the No. 4 Chevrolet Corvette Compuware C6.R driven by Oliver Gavin, and then later by the No. 3 Corvette team car driven by Antonio Garcia, Jan Magnussen and Jordan Taylor as well as from BMW Team RLL’s No. 55 BMW E92 M3. Garcia, Magnussen and Taylor shared a runner-up finish for Corvette Racing, which had already clinched the team and manufacturer’s title at VIRginia International Raceway in September, as well as the driver’s championship for Gavin and Tommy Milner. The runner-up finish at Petit Le Mans added one more trophy to Corvette’s 2012 showcase: the MICHELIN® GREEN X® Challenge GT Championship. The No. 3 Corvette won by racing the cleanest, fastest and most efficient season of all. Jorg Müller, Bill Auberlen and Jonathan Summerton completed the GT podium for BMW Team RLL, following their late-race penalty.
Level 5 Motorsports’ Scott Tucker and Christophe Bouchut repeated as P2 driver champions with a class victory alongside Luis Diaz in their No. 95 HPD ARX-03b. The trio took the lead for good when Conquest Racing’s Martin Plowman went off track and then was penalized for speeding in pit lane with 20 minutes left. Just as it has been all season, Saturday’s P2 race was another duel between Level 5’s two prototypes and the Conquest Morgan-Nissan. Like Muscle Milk, Level 5 needed to finish 70 percent of the class winner’s race distance. Tucker, Bouchut and Diaz made that a moot point with an 8.196-second victory.
CORE autosport capped off its banner year with its eighth Prototype Challenge victory of the season. The trio of Alex Popow, Ryan Dalziel and Mark Wilkins drove its No. 06 ORECA FLM09 to the win by two laps over RSR Racing. Popow won for the fifth time in his rookie season and clinched the class driving title last month at VIR.
The sensational - but unclassified - Nissan DeltaWing finished an impressive sixth overall after starting the race from the back of the grid. The unique Highcroft Racing-entered prototype was driven by Gunnar Jeannette and Lucas Ordonez and completed 388 laps. The DeltaWing – featuring half the weight, half the horsepower and half the aerodynamic drag but all the performance of a typical Le Mans P2 prototype – went from 42nd to 10th overall in the race’s first 37 minutes. It ran as highly as third overall in its first North American race and first since debuting in June at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Alex Job Racing, NGT Motorsports, TRG and JDX Racing battled for nearly the entire 1,000 miles for GTC honors. Consistently running in the top-three with drivers Henrique Cisneros, Mario Farnbacher and Jakub Giermaziak, the No. 30 NGT Porsche 911 GT3 Cup prevailed for the win while both AJR and TRG made costly, off-course excursions. Giermaziak was chasing AJR’s Leh Keen in the closing minutes of the race when Keen launched his No. 22 Porsche 911 GT3 Cup over the curbing at Turn 10. That enabled Giermaziak to sneak past and into the lead, which he held to the checkered flag. Spencer Pumpelly, Emilio Di Guida and Nelson Canache finished second in TRG’s No. 66 Porsche 911 GT3 Cup. The team fought back for the runner-up finish after Pumpelly lodged himself in the Turn 10 gravel at the race’s halfway mark. The No. 68 TRG Porsche 911 GT3 Cup driven by Emmanuel Collard, Manuel Gutierrez, Jr. and Mike Hedlund finished third. Alex Job Racing had already clinched the GTC team championship at VIR in September and the driver’s championship for Cooper MacNeil.
The GTE-Am category, part of the European Le Mans Series, was won by IMSA Performance Matmut and its No. 67 Porsche 911 GT3 RSR driven by Anthony Pons, Raymond Narac and Nicolas Armindo.
All 2012 ALMS champions were recognized at the Night of Champions banquet, Oct. 21, at Chateau Elan in Braselton, Ga.
Check out John Thawley's scintillating images from Road Atlanta here. And A.J. Morning's race weekend report (below) and his photo gallery from Petit Le Mans here.
“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.” – Semisonic
It's a wrap from Petit Le Mans.
By A.J. Morning
Braselton. With the full assimilation of the American Le Mans Series into the NASCAR family of racing still more than a year away, this year’s Petit Le Mans is already showing some early signs that one era of racing is winding down and another is taking shape. Much of the talk on the paddock and infield centered on 2014 and what it means to everyone in sports car racing. Opinions were, well, what you might expect:
“At last, we can address the need for restrictor plates at Sebring!”
“Hey, wouldn’t it be great if NASCAR bought its way into a monopoly of road racing in America – no, wait, nobody’s ever asked that.”
“'ISCAR?' Really?”
And then there’s the High Octane love-it-or-hate-it Truth: “It had to happen, eventually.”
The pros and cons of the unfortunately-named ISCAR deal have been hashed-out for more than a month now, and will continue long into the year to come. What should be a clear plus for manufacturers and sponsors still leaves question marks lingering in the minds of various teams, tracks (none of whom is anxious to lose a date), and most of all, the fans.
It was, for some, easy to forget that we still have a full season of both ALMS and Grand Am to come next year – and we also had one pretty big ALMS season finale over the weekend.
Despite the absence of traditional European turbo-diesel heavy-hitters Audi and Peugeot (the former gone to WEC, the latter just… gone), the crowds still turned out in huge numbers to see their perennial series favorites throw down on the hot Georgia asphalt (and sometimes red clay) with a sprinkling of European Le Mans Series regulars who made the trip, as the ELMS’ own late season schedule has been cannibalized by the FIA’s World Endurance Championship.
Also absent from the week’s racing schedule were some of the regular support series, so no SCCA World Challenge Touring and GT races, though the hole in the schedule was filled with some dramatic and close racing from the Playboy Mazda MX-5 Cup series.
With the ALMS GT title already decided (and LMP categories all but finally sorted), some of the most fun was in watching what were effectively exhibition and development entries – the first proper endurance race for SRT’s new Viper GTS-R team was a success, with the No. 91 car finishing a respectable 8th in class as SRT boss Ralph Gilles watched from his team’s pit box.
However, the bigger (no, biggest) fun-run of the week was without question the US competition debut of the Delta Wing. After being crashed-out by a competitor’s imbecilic move at Le Mans in June, the program was supposedly dead – only to be resurrected for Petit. The joy was momentarily put on hold, however, when another imbecilic move (this time from Green Hornet Porsche driver Peter LeSaffre, who later went on to take out the Muscle Milk HPD car during the race) wrecked the Delta Wing during practice on Wednesday. No strangers to rebuilding a wrecked car overnight at Petit Le Mans, Duncan Dayton’s amazing Highcroft Racing team reconstructed the car overnight – complete with the headrest tips painted high-visibility red to make the otherwise stealth-fighter black Batmobile easier to spot. It worked, and the Delta Wing not only went the distance, but finished an impressive 6th overall.
In an earlier era, another great American racing team once used the term “Competition Proven” on its cars. Decades later, the Delta Wing and all those involved in its effort, have made it Competition Proven.
That’s it for this season – I’ll see you at Sebring.
(Matthew T. Thacker, Autostock, 2012)
Matt Kenseth (No. 17 Roush Fenway Racing Zest Ford) won the Hollywood Casino 400 at the Kansas Speedway Sunday, a crash-fest ruled by a green track surface that took a heavy toll on the competitors, resulting in fourteen cautions, a season high for the Sprint Cup Series. ''I was thinking, 'Man, this has to be entertaining for everybody to watch,''' Kenseth said. ''There was a lot of wild stuff happening.'' It was Kenseth's second victory in three races. Martin Truex Jr. (No. 56 Michael Waltrip Racing NAPA Auto Parts Toyota) was second and Paul Menard (No. 27 Richard Childress Racing Menard's/Certain Teed Chevrolet) was third. Brad Keselowski (No. 2 Penske Racing Miller Lite Dodge) avoided disaster to hang onto his seven-point lead over Jimmie Johnson, with four races remaining in the Chase. Johnson had a wild ride in his No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Lowe's Chevrolet as he hit the wall, ending up with severe damage, only to have his Chad Knaus-led crew come through with repairs that allowed him to continue on to a solid ninth-place finish. Keselowski finished one spot ahead of Johnson, in eighth. Next up is the bullring in Martinsville.
Editor-in-Chief's Note: For my money Rick Mears was one of the greatest drivers this country has ever produced and one of my personal all-time favorites. He was blindingly fast everywhere he went, a consummate racer in every sense of the word and a gentleman on and off the track. Read my colleague Gordon Kirby's excellent piece about Rick here. - PMD
Editor-in-Chief's Note: Check out Michelin's racing website - "Michelin Alley" - and get in on all of the behind-the-scenes buzz. Go here. - PMD
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