Jake Galstad/Lumen
MSR wins Petit Le Mans as Whelen Cadillac takes championship
Meyer Shank Racing with Curb Agajanian went out with a bang, taking victory in the 26th Motul Petit Le Mans in the team's last IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship race for the foreseeable future. During a late-race yellow, in a race punctuated by 13 full-course cautions, the team kept the No. 60 Acura ARX-06 out to gain track position, and Colin Braun swept around leader Renger van der Zande on a restart to take the lead and eventually the win for him, Tom Blomqvist and Helio Castroneves.
“It's amazing with all the crap this team has been through this year. It's too much. It's just too much,” said team principal Mike Shank, his voice breaking.
While the victory brought MSR into spitting distance of the championship, it was Pipo Derani and Alexander Sims taking the title for Whelen Engineering Cadillac Racing as their competitors took themselves out one by one. They finished sixth in the No. 31 V-Series.R with Jack Aitken, but it was enough to take the title, Derani and the team's second in three years.
Ben Hanley, George Kurtz and Nolan Siegel won LMP2 in the No. 04 Crowdstrike by APR ORECA, delivering the Michelin Endurance Cup title to Kurtz and Hanely, as well as the Trueman Award for Kurtz. The championship went to Ben Keating and Paul-Loup Chatin, who finished third with Alex Quinn in the No. 52 PR1 Mathiasen Motorsports ORECA after their chief rivals TDS Racing crashed out.
A late-race tangle between Garret Grist and Felipe Fraga in the No. 74 Riley Motorsports Ligier decide the LMP3 contest in favor of Grist, Dakota Dickerson and Bijoy Garg in the No. 30 Jr III Racing Ligier. Fraga's co-driver Gar Robinson had already claimed the championship by taking the start.
Daniel Juncadella held off Pfaff Motorsports' Patrick Pilet to take the GTD PRO win for he and WeatherTech Racing teammates Jules Gounon and Maro Engel in the No. 79 Mercedes AMG, bookending their season with endurance race victories and delivering Juncadella and Gounon the Michelin Endurance Cup championship.
Loris Spinelli, Misha Goikhberg and Patrick Liddy took the first win for Forte Racing Powered by US RaceTronics in the No. 78 Lamborghini Huracán GT3 Evo2. A late-race incident that brought out the final full-course caution upended the GTD fight, taking out the second-place runner at the time, Jan Heylen in the No. 16 Wright Motorsports Porsche 911 GT3 R, with dramatic flames.
Full reports to follow.
Richard S. James
Richard James is motorsports journalist living in Orange County, Calif, who has been involved in the sport to some degree for three decades. He covers primarily sports car racing as a writer and photographer, with occasional forays into off-road and other forms of racing. A former editor of the SCCA’s publication, SportsCar, he has a special love for the grass-roots side of the sport and participates as a driver in amateur road racing.
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