| Some Expected Results and Some Not so Expected May 2, 2022By David PhillipsIMSA Wire Service  DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – The first natural terrain road course race of the 2022 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship is in the books and quite a race it was. The 11-turn, 2.238-mile WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca saw Wayne Taylor Racing’s No. 10 Konica Minolta and the No. 60 Meyer Shank Racing with Curb-Agajanian Acura ARX-05 Daytona Prototypes (DPi) wage a fierce battle for the class and overall win, while Le Mans Prototype 2 (LMP2) produced a major upset. Not so much from the fact that the No. 8 Tower Motorsport ORECA LMP2 07 won the race but from the relatively disappointing finish by powerhouse PR1 Mathiasen Motorsports. Meanwhile, the No. 16 Wright Motorsports Porsche 911 GT3 R tigered its way to the GT Daytona (GTD) win from deep in the 14-car field, while the similar No. 9 Pfaff Motorsports Porsche rebounded from a star-crossed race at Long Beach to dominate the GTD PRO class. True to Form, Part 1 The DPi and GT classes ran true to recent form. Winners of the last three IMSA races at WeatherTech Raceway, Acura scored a convincing grand slam on the weekend. Saturday saw WTR’s Ricky Taylor lower the DPi track record by nearly half a second in claiming the Motul Pole Award, with Oliver Jarvis less than a tenth of second behind in the MSR Acura – although in fairness, Alex Lynn missed the front row by just 0.059 seconds in the No. 02 Cadillac Racing entry. Once the green flag waved Sunday, however, it was pretty much an Acura benefit as the WTR and MSR cars were effectively in a race of their own. One that saw Taylor jump to an early lead before MSR’s “undercut” pit stop strategy enabled Tom Blomqvist to snatch the lead. However, Filipe Albuquerque commandeered the top spot a few laps later with a bold move in traffic at the famed Corkscrew. From there, the Acuras ran in lockstep, if not nose to tail, to finish a second apart and comfortably ahead of the No. 31 Whelen Engineering Cadillac DPi-V.R in third spot. True to Form, Part 2 Meanwhile, Porsche swept the top spots in GTD and GTD PRO in races that, likewise, ran true to recent WeatherTech Raceway form. In contrast to last month’s Long Beach race, which saw The No. 9 knocked out by a competitor’s errant lug nut during a pit stop, drivers Mathieu Jaminet and Matt Campbell enjoyed a rather uneventful day, leading the No. 14 Vasser Sullivan Lexus RC F GT3 home by more than 30 seconds and the No. 25 BMW M Team RLL BMW M4 GT3 in third spot. While this was, of course, Porsche’s first win in new GTD PRO class at the Monterey, California road circuit, it was the second straight win there for Pfaff in the wake of their GTD triumph in ’21. With Pfaff moving to GTD PRO this year, the No. 16 Wright Porsche ably defended the German marque’s GTD honors – and improved last year’s finish of their own by one spot – as Jan Heylen and Ryan Hardwick took the class win. In contrast to the Pfaff Porsche, however, the GTD winners had their hands full on Sunday as they clawed their way to first from 10th on the grid, leading just 11 out of 107 laps to best the No. 39 CarBahn with Peregrine Racing Lamborghini Huracán GT3 which, in turn, passed the No. 96 Turner Motorsport BMW M4 GT3 for the runner-up spot in the closing moments of the race. True to Form, Not In what could only be considered a major reversal of recent form, PR1 Mathiasen Motorsports not only came up short in its bid for a fourth consecutive LMP2 victory at WeatherTech Raceway, the powerhouse team’s two ORECAs were shut out of the podium altogether. Rather, the No. 8 Tower Motorsport entry was the class of the six-car field, with John Farano and Louis Deletraz storming to a convincing win over the No.18 Era Motorsport ORECA of Dwight Merriman and Ryan Dalziel. Henrik Hedman and Juan Pablo Montoya took third spot in the No. 81 DragonSpeed USA ORECA, this after the vastly experienced Montoya spun entering the pits. Although both PR1 Mathiasen entries led the race at one time or another, when the checkered flag waved, the No. 52 ORECA of Josh Pierson and Patrick Kelly was in fourth ahead of its stablemate No. 11 of Jonathan Bomarito and Steven Thomas. Which only goes to show that recent form only goes so far when it comes to crystal ball gazing. After all, as the saying goes, there’s a reason they run the race. Speaking of which, the next race weekend on the WeatherTech Championship calendar is another natural terrain road course with its own share of ups and downs. The Lexus Grand Prix at Mid-Ohio is where the DPi, LMP2, Le Mans Prototype 3 (LMP3) and GTD classes will be in action along with the IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge, IMSA Prototype Challenge and Idemitsu Mazda MX-5 Cup Presented by BFGoodrich the weekend of May 13-15 in Lexington, Ohio. |
