| Turner BMW Wins O’Reilly Auto Parts 4 Hours of Mid-Ohio; Herta Hyundai Wins Fourth Straight in TCRJune 8, 2025By Tony DiZinnoIMSA Wire Service |
| Race Results LEXINGTON, Ohio – Turner Motorsport has made a habit of developing drivers through its own internal ladder system and may have found its newest star Sunday at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. Francis Selldorff adds his name to the list of those rising American drivers in the Turner stable such as Robby Foley and Patrick Gallagher. Selldorff, co-driving the No. 95 Turner Motorsport BMW M4 GT4 EVO with Dillon Machavern, rose to the challenge of fending off an overflowing pool of more experienced IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge veterans to capture his first Grand Sport (GS) class win in Sunday’s O’Reilly Auto Parts 4 Hours of Mid-Ohio. It’s Turner Motorsport’s 30th GS class win in Michelin Pilot Challenge and 33rd overall (the team also has 3 ST class wins), both of which are team series records, but it’s their first win in a Michelin Pilot Challenge race in nearly two years since Foley and Vin Barletta won at Watkins Glen International in June 2023. It’s Machavern’s seventh Michelin Pilot Challenge win, all in GS. Machavern qualified the No. 95 car in third and handed off to Selldorff for the closing stint. That created an interesting dynamic where Selldorff, who just two years ago won the Grand Sport X (GSX) class in the IMSA VP Racing SportsCar Challenge, would have to fight against three Michelin Pilot Challenge class champions – Jeff Westphal in the No. 39 CarBahn by Peregrine racing BMW M4 GT4 EVO, Jan Heylen in the No. 28 RS1 Porsche 718 GT4 RS CS and Stevan McAleer in the No. 27 Auto Technic Racing BMW M4 GT4 EVO, among others. Westphal appeared the closest to getting past Selldorff through a flurry of late-race restarts – the race had seven full-course cautions with an eighth factored in for the opening lap starting under yellow before the race start on the backstraight – but was unable to get past. His race came undone in the final 15 minutes with apparent right rear suspension issues forcing him to pit lane. The next challenger was a driver who’d scythed past the others, in Daniel Morad aboard the No. 57 Winward Racing Mercedes-AMG GT GT4. Morad had made it past Heylen and a few others into second place, and closed a near two-second gap to just 0.3 of a second heading into the final lap. But ultimately, he came up short by just 0.751 of a second at the finish. “First thing is, I’m out of breath,” Selldorff laughed. “I think the key today was I got the car in the front. The first step was we had to do a little bit of fuel save to manage and it was looking good, and then we had yellow after yellow after yellow. I just tried to nail the restart each time, get a little bit of a gap and then just get good exits everywhere I could.” Team owner Will Turner also spoke to Selldorff’s rise, having seen him from the start of his IMSA career. “The goal was to run him through our program, and we knew when we first tested him that he had some natural talent,” Turner said. “We have seen in every race he gets better and better, and we decided to start finishing him in the races. We might not have had the best (WeatherTech Raceway) Laguna Seca, but he learned from it and he used everything he learned there today.” Selldorff reflected on his own journey: “I started two years ago in VP (Racing Challenge) and I’ve had to come a long way. There’s been a lot of people that have helped me, the drivers, the family and Don Salama on strategy, mainly.” Heylen and co-driver Luca Mars, who’d driven a strong opening stint in the No. 28 RS1 Porsche defending against Machavern and Westphal’s teammate Sean McAlister in the No. 39 CarBahn BMW, finished third. It’s the points leading pair’s fourth straight podium finish in as many races to open the season. The rebuilt No. 44 Ibiza Farm Motorsports McLaren Artura GT4 and the No. 27 Auto Technic BMW of McAleer, Austin and Roland Krainz completed the top five. Kingpin Racing won the Bronze Cup in GS with Satakal Khalsa, David Hodge and Rob Walker sharing the No. 53 Toyota GR Supra GT4 EVO2, finishing 13th overall and in GS. Herta Hyundai Extends Win Streak to Four-for-Four in TCR |
| The Bryan Herta Autosport with Curb Agajanian Hyundai run of form in Touring Car (TCR) rolled on into the fourth round of its season, with the team’s fourth straight win to open 2025 and sixth straight dating to the last two races of 2024. Mason Filippi and Harry Gottsacker delivered a clean and controlled effort in their No. 98 Hyundai Elantra N TCR, leading 111 of 149 laps and only really losing the top spot through pit stops. Filippi’s strong opening stint got the car into the lead past the polesitting No. 93 MMG Honda Civic FL5 TCR, and Gottsacker brought it home. It’s the pair’s second win of the season, although first they’ve won on the road after inheriting the win at Sebring owing to a post-race penalty assessed to a teammate. It’s also the team’s 29th Michelin Pilot Challenge win, and its fourth straight win at Mid-Ohio (2021, 2022, 2024). “At a track like this, it’s really busy, physical and with the weather today it was quite a technical show,” said Gottsacker, who spoke for most of the field that completed a pre-race switch from Michelin’s wet-weather tires to dry-weather slicks moments before the green flag. Denis Dupont and Preston Brown came up one spot shy of their third straight win in a four-hour Michelin Pilot Challenge. But the pair in the No. 76 Herta Hyundai banked their third podium in four races this season. The Motul Pole Award-winning No. 93 MMG Honda of Karl Wittmer, LP Montour and Dai Yoshihara recovered to their second podium of the season after an early race spin. Three more Hyundai entries completed the top six, ahead of the first Audi (the father-daughter pairing of Megan and Ron Tomlinson in the No. 37 Precision Racing LA Audi RS3 LMS TCR) in seventh. The Michelin Pilot Challenge season heads to Watkins Glen International in two weeks for Round 5 of the season, with the LP Building Solutions 120 from June 19-21. |
