Story and photos by Tim Adams
The first weekend of August brought delightful weather for the racers and fans alike as the sportscar brigade rolled into Road America for the Continental Tire Road Race Showcase. The WeatherTech Sportscar Championship cars took top billing with the Porsche GT3 Cup, Continental Tire Sportscar Challenge, and Lamborghini Super Trofeo series adding support for the weekend.
In what has become a tradition for the weekend, IMSA had their state of the series press conference and some interesting announcements were made. IMSA has struggled to try to even out the playing field when it comes to its top Prototype class. The spec LMP2 cars are obviously spec, not a whole lot can be done to improve the performance of these cars. The DPi cars, with heavy manufacturer involvement have been getting faster and faster. That is a big problem. IMSA has had to keep pulling back the DPi levels of performance so that the LMP2 cars could keep up and fight for the overall win. If you’re a manufacturer, are you going to keep sending piles of money only to see your power levels held back so spec LMP2 cars can compete? Something had to be done. IMSA has now decided that they will be going back to two separate prototype classes. DPi will be factory backed and have all professional driver lineups. DPi will also have a separate Balance of Performance (BoP), and no longer be pegged back to the fastest LMP2 levels.
A big change to the LMP2 rules is it will be a true Pro-Am class. Under the 2018 rules, teams could have an all professional driver lineup in LMP2. Going back to the Pro-Am rules align IMSA with the WEC in Europe, and the rules for running at Le Mans.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out, as the two car LMP2 team JDC-Miller Motorsports has announced they will be moving to DPi and run two Cadillacs. Juncos Racing also confirmed a Cadillac DPi entry. If you’re a Cadillac fan, there should be no fewer than six on the grid at the 24 Hours of Daytona in January 2019. After the Road America race, the AFS/PR1 Mathiasen Motorsports team switched from the Liger LMP2 they were running, to the Oreca LMP2. At the time of this writing several team’s plans are still up in the air for the 2019 season. There will be some LMP2 cars on the grid at Daytona, but no one knows how many will run the entire season. The LMP2 cars will no longer be able to compete for the overall win, they will be eligible to run in France at Le Mans, but will they still be attractive to sponsors not being able to run up front on the grid.
The GTD class will also see some changes next year. The teams can still compete for the GTD series championship over the 10-race scheduled, but there will be a separate WeatherTech Sprint Cup for GTD. This will consist of the shorter races that make up much of the schedule. Great for teams to compete for a championship within a championship? Maybe, but I think it is a bit confusing for fans trying to follow the series.
The 2019 race schedule was announced as well. There are no real changes, with the race in Detroit being the only one up in the air. It needs local government approval!
The race itself was a crazy fuel mileage race in the last minutes in the Prototype class and GTLM. In the beginning the JDC Miller Motorsports LMP2 yellow banana, as it is known sped off. The Dpi Cadillacs took turns leading, then with two laps to go it looked like Mazda might final get it first win. The Mazda had to pit with two laps to go from the lead and turned it over the Core Autosport Oreca LMP2, that was also low on fuel. Colin Braun managed to get it across the finish line in front though, to capture the overall win.
In GTLM, BMW was also looking for it’s first win in the M8. Both team cars could not make it to the end though, one suffered electrical gremlins, and the other team car ran out of fuel. This handed the win to the Ford GT #67 of Chip Ganassi racing.
In GTD, Wright Motorsports captured it’s first win with factory Porsche driver Patrick Long putting it on the pole, and passing the Paul Miller Racing Lamborghini late in the race. Joining Patrick Long in the winner’s circle was his co-driver Christina Nielsen, who is defending her GTD season title of 2017, making the switch to Porsche this year.
Overall it was another great weekend of sportscar racing at Road America. The only wish is that the race be moved back to being run on Saturday, and back to it’s 4PM-8PM time. A track this big deserves a longer race, and racing into the twilight, where the cars really begin to shine.
