| Defensive Success; Weather Warriors and Symphony of Sounds June 24, 2025By David PhillipsIMSA Wire Service |
| WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. – Looking at Sunday’s Sahlen’s Six Hours of The Glen for the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship brought to light a few key observations. The top finishing entries weren’t necessarily among the top championship contenders, while some championship contenders made handiwork of a tough weather day. DE-fense Wins Championships … and Races It’s often said defense wins championships, be it the Super Bowl, the Stanley Cup or the Larry O’Brien Trophy (which was awarded Sunday night in Game 7 to the Oklahoma City Thunder over the Indiana Pacers). Saturday saw a superb example of how defense can also win an automobile race as Jan Heylen spent the second half of the IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge on defense in the No. 28 RS1 Porsche 718 GT4 RS CS he shares with Luca Mars, keeping a hungry string of faster cars at bay to score the team’s second straight win and pad their lead in the Grand Sport (GS) manufacturers, team and drivers championship standings. Make no mistake, the RS1 Porsche was quick. Quick enough for Mars to qualify fourth fastest and move up a place at the start. But even though Heylen emerged in the lead after the pit stop exchange he felt the car’s pace was lacking in the heat of the day. The numbers back him up as the RS1 Porsche’s best lap of 1:56.455 made it just the eighth fastest car in the race. And yet at no point did Heylen’s tactics raise any issues about blocking. He never put a wheel wrong and made sure his Porsche was always in just the right spot to discourage any overtaking maneuvers. What does that all have to do with Sunday’s Sahlen’s Six Hours of The Glen? Well, it seems defense should be a priority for Porsche Penske Motorsport in the remaining three events on the Grand Touring Prototype (GTP) schedule. Having bolted to a comfortable one-two lead in the GTP standings on the strength of four straight wins (and three one-two finishes) in the opening rounds of the 2025 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, the No. 7 and No. 6 Penske Porsches may have found themselves on the back foot in the wake of Balance of Performance adjustments prior to June’s Chevrolet Sports Car Classic in Detroit. Still, the No. 7 (1795) and the No. 6 Porsches (1725) enjoyed championship leads of nearly 400 points over the No. 24 BMW M Team RLL BMW M Hybrid V8 (1498) and the No. 93 Acura Meyer Shank Racing w/Curb Agajanian Acura ARX-06 (1481) headed to Watkins Glen. Apart from Felipe Nasr’s bold advance up the charts in the early laps of the race, the Penske Porsches pretty much had to rely on strategic moves to contend for podium finishes. But in the bigger picture, the No. 7 and 6 Porsches really only needed to finish in the top five or six to take another step toward GTP manufacturer, team and driver championships. And while team Matt (Mathieu Jaminet and Matt Campbell) brought the No. 6 Porsche home in fourth, the No. 7 Porsche was classified P11 after Tandy crashed out of sixth spot with just over an hour left in the race. Fortunately for Porsche Penske, their closest pursuers in the championship failed to fully capitalize on the No. 7 Porsche’s misfortune. The No. 93 Acura was credited with a sixth-place finish, two better than the No. 24 BMW. Meanwhile, the top three finishers (the victorious No. 60 Meyer Shank Acura, the runner-up No. 40 and No. 10 Wayne Taylor Racing Cadillac V-Series.Rs) are all but out of the running for the titles barring a miracle. All that said, Porsche Penske Motorsport will likely find itself defending its once all but insurmountable points lead in the remaining three races. Of course, this is not to say or suggest the No. 7 and No. 6 Porsches should or will shift into cruise control mode. After all, a good offense is often the best defense – witness the fact that Heylen and Mars bolstered their championship hopes with Saturday’s win. But the reality appears to require an adjusted mindset at Porsche Penske, one focused on defending that championship points lead rather than adding to their already impressive win total. Mother Nature Always Bats Last |
| Rain is the great equalizer, at least according to one of racing’s oldest maxims. And truly, there’s nothing like some good old-fashioned precipitation to neutralize a car’s or cars’ technical advantage and put the emphasis back in the hands of the drivers. Never was that more apparent than in the opening seven and a half minutes of the Sahlen’s Six Hours at The Glen when Nasr took advantage of a dampish track to storm from into the lead in the No. 7 Porsche 963, after qualifying 1.7 seconds behind the pole in 10th. With an intermittent drizzle falling on The Glen’s “Boot” (aka Turns 6, 7, 8 and 9), Nasr’s substantial talents came to the fore as he slipped and slid into the lead, showing the GTP field a clean (if damp) pair of heels. That lead was not to last as, once the rain dissipated, van der Zande and the No. 31 Cadillac Whelen Cadillac V-Series.R of Jack Aitken duly demoted Nasr to third spot. Still, Nasr’s early drive was worth the price of admission. Also noteworthy, if only slightly less spectacular, was the rapid advance of Roman Grosjean in the No. 63 Automobili Lamborghini Squadra Corse Lamborghini SC63. One spot behind Nasr on the grid, Grosjean smartly moved up the charts to run in the top four in those early intermediate conditions. Those with keen memories will recall that Grosjean forged the Lambo into the lead during last year’s very wet TireRack.com Battle on the Bricks of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The history of motorsports is rife with heroic bad weather performances, be it Jackie Stewart’s epic win in the rain and fog of the 1968 German Grand Prix, John Cannon’s giant-killer of a drive the same year in an antique McLaren MkIIB at a sodden Laguna Seca Can-Am race, or the stunning drive of Nick Tandy (with a little help from his friends and co-drivers Patrick Pilet and Richard Lietz) as his GTLM Porsche 911 RSR humbled a field of prototypes en route to the overall win in monsoon conditions at the 2015 Petit Le Mans. Rain can play a role in any road race at any time of the year. But the turbulent weather conditions that are a fact of life in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, North- and Southeastern United States (not to mention southern Ontario) during the summer and early fall often impact an IMSA WeatherTech Sports Car Championship that races at Watkins Glen, Canadian Tire Motorsports Park, Road America, VIRginia International Raceway, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta; all the moreso given some of those races last six or 10 hours, giving Mother Nature ample time to toss competitors some curve balls. And not just the drivers. Changeable weather can make – or break – a team’s fuel, tire and pit stop strategy, thus keeping engineers and strategists on their toes. What it all adds up to is “unpredictability.” While Ma Nature may or may not dictate a race’s final outcome, she can sure make things interesting. The Glen is Alive With the Sounds of IMSA More years ago than I can care to remember, I was on the fence about trekking to what was then known as the 6 Hours of Watkins Glen. Sure, I wanted to go, but various obligations gave me pause when pondering a trip to upstate New York. Work? Girlfriend? Bank account on the brink of red ink? Ultimately those obligations didn’t stand a chance against the opportunity to see or, more to the point, hear not one but two 3-liter Matra MS670Cs howling around The Glen. Although only one of the Matras went the distance, it finished first and – listening to those dozen French pistons frantically pumping up and down in a pair of Matra MS73 V-12s turning up 10,000+ RPM – more than justified my decision to make the pilgrimage to Watkins Glen. I was reminded of that distant weekend while taking in Sunday’s Sahlen’s Six Hours at The Glen . . . in no small part thanks to the shriek of the Aston Martin Valkyrie’s 6.5-liter V12 revving to upwards of 11,000 RPM. Sure, in its first year of IMSA WeatherTech Sports Car Championship and World Endurance Championship (WEC) competition, Aston Martin’s GTP has yet to grace a podium, let alone win a race. But that glorious sound! Surely, it’s responsible for an uptick in Aston Martin showroom traffic worldwide and one which, it is hoped, will in time see the Valkyrie at the sharp end of WeatherTech Sports Car Championship and WEC fields. It certainly caught the attention of one spectator who, upon hearing the Valkyrie scream as Roman De Angelis got back to power exiting the Inner Loop, said “Wow! That one sounds like no other car out there.” But while soaking-up the sound of those dozen British cylinders firing more than 180 times a second, I was also treated to a remarkable diversity of sounds from the other GTP engines – Acura’s twin turbo, 2.4-liter V6, BMW’s M Hybrid V8’s 4-liter, twin-turbo P66/3, Cadillac’s naturally aspirated 5.5-liter V8, Lamborghini S63’s 3.8-liter, twin-turbo V8 and Porsche’s twin-turbo 4.6-liter 9RD – and that’s just the GTP field. One cannot overlook the soundtrack provided by their GTD and GTD PRO counterparts in the forms of the turbocharged Aston Martin Vantage GT3 Evo’s 4-liter V8, BMW M4 GT3 EVO’s 3-liter inline six and Ferrari 296 GT3’s V6 together with the naturally aspirated Corvette Z06 GT3.R’s flat-plane crankshaft 5.5-liter V8, Ford Mustang GT3’s 5.4-liter Ford Coyote V8, Lamborghini Huracán GT3 EVO2’s V-10, Lexus RC F GT3’s 5.4-liter V8, Mercedes-AMG GT3’s 6.2-liter V8 and Porsche 911 GT3 R (992)’s 4.2-liter flat-six cylinder boxer. Adding to the sonic mix was the welcome return of the LMP2 competitors after a long post Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring layoff, with a dozen 4.2-liter, naturally aspirated Gibson V8s snapping, crackling and popping when their drivers breathed their throttles under braking. In an increasingly homogenized era of motorsports where many series feature a limited variety of engines and cars whose indistinguishable shapes are at the remorseless mercy of wind tunnels running 24/7/365, the cacophony of the WeatherTech Championship was music to my ears and those of the thousands of fans who joined me at The Glen. |
