| July 8, 2020 Staff Report IMSA Wire Service |
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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – The IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship made a triumphant return last Saturday night at Daytona International Speedway.
The IMSA WeatherTech 240 At Daytona – somewhat fittingly running on the Fourth of July – was the series’ first race since the Rolex 24 At Daytona on Jan. 25-26. That was an unexpected and unscheduled span of 160 days.
That’s a long time. By comparison, there were 105 days between the 2019 season-ending Motul Petit Le Mans at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta last October and the green flag falling on Jan. 25 for the 2020 Rolex 24.
The good news is, you couldn’t tell that more than five months had passed between Rounds 1 and 2 of the 2020 WeatherTech Championship. We had two hours and 40 minutes of competitive, caution-free racing which produced worthy victors in all three classes.
Here’s a closer look at some of the key storylines post-race:
It Was Anybody’s Race in GTLM In Saturday night’s post-race report, we referred to the GT Le Mans (GTLM) battle as a high-speed game of musical chairs.
And it was. All six cars on the class’ entry list led at least three laps out of 90 in the GTLM race, which was the product of unpredictable track conditions brought about by prerace rains and good Balance of Performance (BoP).
The race-winning No. 3 Corvette C8.R had the fastest lap of the race at one minute, 43.527 seconds, less than two tenths of a second faster than fastest laps posted by the No. 25 BMW M8 GTE (1:43.610) and the No. 911 Porsche 911 RSR-19 (1:43.658).
In the end, the outcome was determined by a combination of smart strategy and heady driving, exactly as it should be.
Lots of Leaders in DPi Too While it wasn’t 100 percent like it was in GTLM, more than half of the Daytona Prototype international (DPi) field held the lead at one point or another in the IMSA WeatherTech 240 At Daytona.
To be exact, five DPi machines topped the charts with race winners Harry Tincknell and Jonathan Bomarito combining to lead the most laps – 48 – in their No. 55 Mazda Motorsports RT-24P machine. The No. 31 Whelen Engineering Cadillac DPi-V.R shared by Pipo Derani and Gabby Chaves led the second-most laps with 26 on a divergent tire strategy from other DPi front-runners early on.
The pair of Acura Team Penske ARX-05s, meanwhile, combined to lead 13 laps. Had it not been for an uncharacteristic mechanical issue that removed the team’s No. 7 entry that Helio Castroneves qualified on pole a few hours earlier, a different tale may have been told post-race.
As it was Mazda scored its third 1-2 sweep in just over one year’s time, with a hard-earned third-place run by past Rolex 24 At Daytona overall winners Joao Barbosa and Sebastien Bourdais in the No. 5 Mustang Sampling Cadillac.
Up-And-Down Daytona Debut for Compass McLaren Last weekend marked the first Daytona appearance for the No. 76 Compass Racing McLaren 720S GT3 and qualifying could not have gone any better.
Corey Fergus, in qualifying for his WeatherTech Championship debut, gave the team and manufacturer its first-ever Motul Pole Award Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately, however, the opening Round of the IMSA WeatherTech Sprint Cup for the GT Daytona (GTD) class season quickly turned sour for the team.
Fergus experienced a fuel-pressure issue on his way down pit lane for the prerace recon lap, which was quickly remedied by the team but not before the pit exit closed. That dropped the car from the GTD pole to a pit-lane start, which also carries with a drive-through penalty under green-flag conditions.
Shortly thereafter, Fergus had a spin that dropped the car off the lead lap and with the race run without a full-course caution, he and co-driver Paul Holton came home 11th in class, two laps down to the winner.
