IMSA: Ganassi returns to Victory Lane after thrilling battle

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Scott Pruett held on by 2.336sec to win the IMSA United SportsCar Championship's Lone Star Le Mans race and score Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates' first win since Long Beach back in April.

The veteran champion and his teammate Memo Rojas had been in fighting mood from the very start of the race at Circuit of The Americas (see photo gallery, BELOW), when Rojas went three abreast with Wayne Taylor Racing's Corvette DP and OAK Racing's polesitting Ligier JS P2 Honda. While OAK's Yacaman bundled Ricky Taylor into the run-off area at Turn 1, Rojas was up to second, and remained in touch with the leader.

Action Express Racing duo Christian Fittipaldi and Joao Barbosa were also in the lead mix from the start, and slightly differing pit strategies saw Barbosa emerge ahead of Brundle. But both were chasing Pruett, as Ganassi had elected to go for just two pit stops. (Pruett would finally run out of fuel on the slow-down lap.)

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Although Brundle swiftly hunted down the DP pair, he was struggling in traffic, whereas Pruett squirted the Ganassi Riley-Ford Ecoboost smartly ahead of traffic, and always seemed to have at least a 1.5sec cushion between himself and Barbosa, and sometimes it stretched to three times that much.

In the final 15mins, Barbosa got held up by the battling GTLM BMW Z4s just enough to allow Brundle to muscle his way past into second, but it was too late for the OAK car to catch Pruett.

Another car that should have been in the mix was the Spirit of Daytona Racing Corvette DP, but when Michael Valiante spun Yacaman following the restart after the race's solitary caution period, he received a drive-through penalty from which the team never recovered. They finished sixth behind Ed Brown/Johannes van Overbeek (ESM Racing HPD ARX-03b) and Ozz Negri/John Pew (Michael Shank Racing Riley-Ford Ecoboost).

In the Prototype Challenge class, polesitters Sean Rayhall and Luis Diaz conquered for 8Star Motorsports but their race was not without its hitches, as it got spun around mid-race. However, the team's day was saved by some typically strong driving from both its drivers and problems hitting some of its strongest opposition - RSR Racing and Starworks Motorsport. The latter scooped third, courtesy of Renger van der Zande and Mirco Schultis, but it was the No. 54 CORE autosport team of Jon Bennett and Colin Braun who came out the biggest winners – second place sealed the PC championship title one race early.

MOPAR fans had their day of days, as Jonathan Bomarito and Kuno Wittmer headed Marc Goossens/Dominik Farnbacher in a 1-2 finish for the Dodge SRT Viper GTS-Rs in the GT Le Mans category, while Jeroen Bleekemolen and Ben Keating took their second GT Daytona victory of the season in the GT3-R Viper.

Right from the drop of the green flag, the Vipers and Porsche 911s were evenly matched at the front of GTLM – and in a class of their own. What appeared to have decided the race was the caution period, since the lead Porsche of Nick Tandy and Jorg Bergmeister had stopped already whereas their opposition had not. And so from the 1-hour mark until 20 minutes before the end, they held an apparently solid 40-second lead. However, a mechanical failure in the closiing stages rendered this talented pair as a DNF.

This handed the Vipers the advantage, as the second Porsche of Pat Long and Michael Christensen, an early leader after ducking around Wittmer, was 20sec adrift at the checkered flag. Bomarito and Wittmer have now unofficially moved into the lead of the GTLM Drivers' Championship

In GTD, Ben Keating did a fine job in the early stages of the race to hold onto a car which had been rendered loose by over-correcting an understeer issue during practice and when he handed over to Jeroen Bleekemolen, he was running fifth, albeit some way off the pace of the Alex Job Racing and Snow Racing Porsches. However, Bleekemolen started eating into the lead of the Turner Motorsports BMW Z4 of Dane Cameron and Markus Palttala, which had led the first stint.

Bleekemolen moved into the lead with half-an-hour to go and never looked back. Meanwhile Cameron also lost second place to the Magnus Racing Porsche 911 of Andy Lally/John Potter in the closing stages.