| As the No. 60 Acura Keeps Searching, Bill Auberlen Keeps Surging August 9, 2021 By John Oreovicz IMSA Wire Service DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – It’s hard to beat a weekend when sports cars are on track at Road America. Rain or shine. Mother Nature brought a little of everything to Wisconsin’s Kettle Moraine region for the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship’s annual visit to one of America’s most beloved road courses, creating challenges for competitors and the thousands of campers onsite. But with minimal delay or disruption, the four-day IMSA Sports Car Weekend featured some 35 hours of activity. The five classes of cars in the WeatherTech Championship were joined by the Idemitsu Mazda MX-5 Cup Presented by BFGoodrich Tires, Lamborghini Super Trofeo North America, Porsche Carrera Cup North America Presented by the Cayman Islands and the IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge on the weekend schedule. The racing was at times incredibly close (Michael Carter won an MX-5 Cup race in a photo finish by 0.008 seconds), while two of the contests came down to fuel management yet featured wildly different finishes. Here are three takeaways from that jam-packed slate: Meyer Shank Racing with Curb-Agajanian Denied: This team is having quite a year. Helio Castroneves won the Indianapolis 500, and MSR is on the brink of expanding to a full-time two-car IndyCar Series effort next year anchored by the veteran Brazilian who teamed with Ricky Taylor in a Team Penske Acura to win the Daytona Prototype international (DPi) class of the 2020 WeatherTech Championship. MSR upgraded its IMSA program for 2021, following consecutive GT Daytona (GTD) championships by stepping up to the top DPi class while maintaining manufacturer links with Acura. Despite several promising outings, the No 60 Acura is the only entry among the six regular DPi competitors that has not found victory lane in 2021. At Road America, drivers Dane Cameron and Olivier Pla came tantalizingly close. MSR took a gamble by twice pitting early in the race to get out of sequence, accepting it would need a timely full-course caution to make its alternate plan work. Cameron held a comfortable 15-second lead in the No. 60 AutoNation/SiriusXM Acura DPi, but he was far more marginal on fuel than the No. 31 Whelen Engineering Racing Cadillac being anchored by Pipo Derani. Cameron needed that full-course caution to make the finish without stopping, but it never came. With three and a half minutes remaining in the two-hour, 40-minute contest, the No. 60 peeled into the pits for a splash-and-go. It dropped Cameron to fourth place, and he then moved aside on the final lap to allow the championship-leading Wayne Taylor Racing Acura past to score a few additional points. The MSR Acura led 26 laps and set the fastest lap of the race. “We’ve been struggling a little throughout the week, so we took a shot at it with a different strategy today,” Cameron explained. “We were a little bit off sequence there and needed a little bit of help to be able to make it work, but just came up a little bit short. But I’m proud of the guys for an aggressive call and glad we had a good, fast car. They did a great job in the pits, and it was a good strategy. “We just kind of rolled the dice and needed a little bit of help and didn’t get it.”  Amazing Auberlen: Bill Auberlen found his niche in sports car racing, and the 52-year-old Californian continues to rewrite the IMSA record book. During the IMSA Sports Car Weekend, Auberlen teamed with Dillon Machavern to win the Road America 120 Michelin Pilot Challenge race on Saturday, stretching his fuel over the final stint to cross the line a comfortable 15.75 seconds ahead of the second-placed car after a masterful drive in dry-to-wet conditions. “We are having a dream year, the kind you read about, and now we extend our championship lead with three races to go,” Auberlen said. “I’m still smiling after this one.” The GTD class competition in Sunday’s WeatherTech Championship event was also decided by strategy, and it also featured a large margin of victory. Again, in a Turner Motorsport BMW, Auberlen and Robby Foley claimed second place, almost 12 seconds behind the winning No. 9 Pfaff Motorsports Porsche. While it wasn’t a win, the third podium finish of 2021 vaulted Auberlen and Foley back into the GTD points lead, reclaiming the top spot from the No. 23 Heart of Racing Aston Martin duo of Roman De Angelis and Ross Gunn. Tight WeatherTech Championship Battles: In becoming the first back-to-back winners in DPi this year, Derani and teammate Felipe Nasr narrowed the gap to championship leaders Taylor and Filipe Albuquerque to 41 points. The No. 55 Mazda Motorsports pairing of Harry Tincknell and Oliver Jarvis is just two points further back. There can be as much as a 121-point swing on any given race weekend, so even Kevin Magnussen and Renger van der Zande (203 points back for Chip Ganassi Racing) and the Meyer Shank duo (minus-302 points) can’t be counted out. Le Mans Prototype 2 (LMP2) and Le Mans Prototype 3 (LMP3) feature similarly close battles with current margins of 58 and 50 points, respectively. Auberlen and Foley hold a slim 18-point advantage over De Angelis and Gunn, with two other pairings within 124 points. In fact, the only class championship not currently within nail-biting range is GT Le Mans (GTLM), where Corvette Racing holds 1-2 in the standings with Jordan Taylor and Antonio Garcia a comfortable 214 points up on Nick Tandy and Tommy Milner. With three DPi races remaining, two in LMP2, one in LMP3 and four for the GT classes, a lot can happen by the time the checkered flag falls on the Motul Petit Le Mans at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta on Nov. 13. Stay tuned! |
