Championship Battles; Saturday Night Optimization; Testing the Limits
By David Phillips
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – What began more than nine months ago on a chilly Florida winter afternoon at Daytona International Speedway’s Rolex 24 At Daytona comes to an end Saturday on what figures to be a cool Georgia fall evening at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta with Motul Petit Le Mans. That would be the 2025 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, an 11-race weekend season featuring the world’s fastest sports cars competing on North America’s classic road racing courses.
It’s a series and season that have produced more twists and turns than a gymkhana, one that will crown champions in the Grand Touring Prototype (GTP), Le Mans Prototype 2 (LMP2), Grand Touring Daytona Pro (GTD PRO) and Grand Touring Daytona (GTD) categories as well as the IMSA Michelin Endurance Cup, which honors achievements in the WeatherTech Championship’s five long distance events.
Championships – and More – at Stake
With drivers, teams and manufacturer titles at stake in four classes (LMP2 awards only drivers and team titles as all competitors run Gibson-powered ORECA LMP2 07s) in both the WeatherTech Championship and Michelin Endurance Cup, plus the Jim Trueman Award for LMP2 competitors and Bob Akin Award for Bronze-rated GTD competitors, there are more than 20 championships on the line this weekend.
As for the WeatherTech Championship, apart from GTD, where Philip Ellis, Russell Ward and the No. 57 Winward Racing Mercedes-AMG GT3 basically just need to take the green flag in order to clinch the driver, team and manufacturer crowns, every championship in every class is in play.
Speaking of GTD points, Brendan Iribe and Orey Fidani are (once again) vying for the Bob Akin Award given annually to the top scoring Bronze-rated driver in the WeatherTech Championship’s GTD class. In addition to a trophy, the award winner gets an automatic invitation into the following year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans. Fidani and Iribe have split the award the past two seasons with Iribe winning in 2023 and Fidani winning last year. Iribe’s win at Indianapolis tied Fidani for the Bob Akin Award points lead, meaning whichever driver finishes ahead Saturday wins.
Meanwhile, another ticket to Le Mans is in the offing for the winner of the Jim Trueman Award, presented each season to the top finishing Bronze-rated driver in LMP2.
PJ Hyett, who co-drives the No. 99 AO Racing (aka “Spike”) ORECA with Dane Cameron, heads Daniel Goldburg in the No. 22 United Autosports USA ORECA in the race for the Trueman Award. With just 85 points separating Hyett and Goldberg, that contest too will likely go down to the wire on Saturday night.
Saturday Night’s All Right
Speaking of Saturday night . . .
As Elton John once observed, Saturday night’s all right for fighting. That has surely been the case in previous Motul Petit Le Mans as, with a multitude of championships typically on the line, the final hour or two of the 10-hour event have produced some of the most intense racing in any given season.
Understandably. On one hand, competitors fighting for a title often drive hyper-aggressively in seeking to either defend their points lead from a rival or, if the situation is reversed, overtake the points leader. On the other hand, competitors who have fallen out of championship contention have little or nothing to lose by going for the race win. Adding to the competitive cocktail is the fact that the race typically attracts an enhanced field (in this year’s case 53 cars) to do battle on the 2.54-mile, 12-turn Michelin Raceway layout – or approximately 21 cars per mile.
“It’s always a fascinating race,” says Matt Bell, Fidani’s co-driver in the No. 13 AWA Corvette Z06 GT3.R. “It’s always multiple championship battles up for grabs, which probably makes this, in my opinion, the hardest sports car race in the world when you throw in the traffic, the length of the track and the amount of cars there with everything on the line.”
Adding to the challenges is the fact that track conditions are constantly changing throughout a race that starts at 12:10 p.m. ET and ends at 10:10 p.m. Optimizing for the night may be a better strategy than nailing the setup for the heat of the day.
“The night at Petit is incredibly important in terms of the race result,” says Alexander Sims, driver of No. 3 Corvette Racing by Pratt Miller Motorsports Corvette Z06 GT3.R. “It’s sometimes the case that, depending on the car … you have to make a compromise and put up with a difficult car in the day so that it’s there for you at night. And that sometimes is a pretty bold call to make, honestly, to have to endure five, six hours of racing where you don’t have the pace, to trust that it’s going to come good in the end. And obviously sometimes it would and sometimes it wouldn’t.”
But you have to still be around when night falls in order to take advantage of a car that’s at its best in the cool of the evening.
“It’s a challenge at the beginning,” says Albert Costa, driver of the No. 81 DragonSpeed Ferrari 296 GT3. “You survive the first, I don’t know, four hours in the sun and then you prepare all weekend for the night and this is going to be the most important thing. But you also need to keep the car alive . . . so I think the word I would describe is survive, just survive.”
Testing the Limits
IMSA’s Road America weekend saw nearly as many yellow caution flags on track as yellow penalty flags in an NFL football game. The last two weekends have seen a shift from race control towards enhancing the cleanliness of driving standards. Although there has still been a flurry of penalties – more than 30 drive-throughs were assessed at the six-hour TireRack.com Battle On The Bricks – the driving standards have improved.
At least according to Ollie Millroy, driver of the No. 70 Inception Racing Ferrari 296 GT3 (center, in-between co-drivers Brendan Iribe and Frederik Schandorff).
“All that they’re saying is race each other guys, go side-by-side a whole lap if you like, just race like adults,” he said. “I really don’t think that they’re being unreasonable. The rules are pretty clear. We all know what they’re expecting.
“I actually said to Beaux (Barfield) the race director after Indy that I just thought that generally, even between the different classes as well, the driving standards were just so much better the last two races. We were on the receiving end of one of these new harsh penalties at VIR . . . so it was painful, and we were obviously not happy about it; it’s not what you’re used to in IMSA. But I think generally the message is definitely getting across to all of us as drivers what they’re expecting to see in race control.”
“Honestly I’m quite happy with it,” Sims added. “I think the rules are there to be respected . . . Everybody can make mistakes. That happens. But there has certainly been a lot of racing in the past that was not mistakes. It was people knowingly driving other people off the track and, yeah, going beyond what I think the spirit of the racing should be. I think we can all probably agree that Road America was too out of hand. And so I think the right reaction has happened.”
As ever, timing is everything if or more likely when push comes to shove on Saturday. Have an issue or make a mistake early, and there’s time to recover. Have it late, and it may deprive you of some season-long hardware.
The pursuit of all the titles comes Saturday at noon ET on NBC, with streaming via Peacock, IMSA.TV and IMSA’s Official YouTube channel.