A pink Cadillac going 170 mph at nighttime with no headlights received Petit Le Mans this previous weekend. I used to be fortunate sufficient to be staring out of a collection overlooking the entrance straight at Highway Atlanta within the race’s closing minutes when it got here rocketing down the hill via flip 12, invisible within the darkness however for its rooftop sentinel gentle, and within the time it took to articulate the thought, “Who the—?” it turned obvious that the automotive with no lights was certainly the race-leading 01 Chip Ganassi Racing V-Collection.R piloted by a presumably wide-eyed Renger van der Zande. Lights or no lights, he didn’t carry, and certainly accomplished the higher a part of a lap hurtling into the blackness of the Georgia night time like a teen hellbent on scaring the bejeezus out of his associates.
Miraculously, simply as John Hindaugh within the press field under started to take a position about black flags, the lights flickered and got here again to life — solely to flicker once more, the document crowd readily available holding its collective breath as van der Zande maintained his 3-second lead over the quantity 6 Porsche Penske 963 within the race’s last moments, first with one headlight, then none, and at last each flashing frantically as he took the checkered flag to fireworks and jubilation.
The Cadillac’s slim championship hopes going into the weekend had been quashed throughout qualifying, however the consequence made for an unexpectedly glad ending to a last season for the CGR program that had appeared at occasions star-crossed. Wayne Taylor Racing will take over the manufacturing unit Cadillac effort in 2025. Whereas we all know what’s in retailer for van der Zande, the identical can’t be mentioned for his full-season co-driver Sebastian Bourdais. However, along with Scott Dixon they actually made their closing efficiency within the 01 automotive a memorable one.
The temper within the Acura suite from which I witnessed the above was extra subdued. Of their last outings earlier than Meyer Shank and HRC assume the Acura helm subsequent 12 months, every of the WTR ARX-06s led the race at occasions. With lower than an hour remaining, Ricky Taylor within the blue quantity 10 automotive had simply taken the lead from Nick Tandy’s Porsche 963 when a deadstick Proton Mustang appeared in his path, too late to be prevented. Fortunately nobody was critically harm, however the injury to each vehicles (and the Wright Motorsports Porsche 911 of Jan Heylen, who’d tangled with Corey Lewis within the Ford) was terminal, and Taylor’s emotion after being eradicated from rivalry within the last hours of this race for a second 12 months working was evident in a gut-wrenching interview again within the WTR storage. Powerful stuff.
The manufacturing unit 963s rounded out the GTP podium, the quantity 7 automotive of Dane Cameron and Felipe Nasr ending third and clinching the championship after a season that appeared much more like what one may’ve anticipated when information first broke of a Penske-Porsche partnership than final 12 months’s considerably shaky begin.
We would not but be seeing fairly the Eighties-level world dominance of their 956 and 962 forebears (and even the newer success of the 919s), however each right here and within the WEC, the Penske Porsches made it clear in 2024 that they’re the staff to beat going ahead.
There have been extra championships to be settled. A fifth-place end was sufficient for plucky Polish upstarts Inter Europol, who scored a shock win at Le Mans in 2023, to internet the LMP2 title of their first full season in IMSA (with the assistance of stateside companions PR1/Mathiasen Motorsports). In GTD Professional, rookie Laurin Heinrich’s pole efficiency in qualifying proved to be the distinction for everybody’s favourite dinosaur, the AO Racing “Rexy” Porsche 911, in ending a scant 4 factors forward of the quantity 23 Coronary heart of Racing Aston Martin within the standings regardless of a tricky day for the previous and a podium for the staff of Ross Gunn, Alex Riberas, and Roman de Angelis within the latter. Lastly, to the shock of completely nobody, the Winward Racing Mercedes-AMG wrapped up the GTD title for Phillip Ellis and Russell Ward after a remarkably constant season that started with a win at Daytona all the way in which again in January.
This 12 months’s version of the Petit — with attendance up higher than 10% over final 12 months per IMSA’s John Doonan, and the most important crowd one fellow garage-gawker who’d been coming because the inaugural working again in 1998 informed me he’d ever seen — additionally tied a bow on one other stunningly profitable 12 months for the collection. It’s turning into more and more troublesome to argue with the concept sports activities automotive and endurance racing within the U.S. has by no means been more healthy, with packed grids, sick vehicles, proficient and charismatic drivers, and nearer competitors than ever earlier than. And with the wild, normally-aspirated V12 Aston Martin Valkyrie becoming a member of the GTP fray subsequent 12 months, and nonetheless extra producers (Hyundai, Mercedes-AMG, McLaren?) both overtly discussing or rumored to be planning top-level prototype efforts, the get together reveals no indicators of slowing down. Even Cupra — the high-performance Seat spinoff model mentioned to be planning an entry into the U.S. market by decade’s finish — had a TCR automotive on show, with which they hope to hitch the Michelin Pilot Problem subsequent season. Apparently IMSA is so good at this level that they’re inventing new automotive corporations simply to compete in it!
And actually, there may not be a greater venue to showcase all of it than Highway Atlanta. This author spent 4 years residing inside a simple day’s drive and someway by no means made it down. I knew on the time that I used to be silly for not making an attempt more durable to make it occur; now I do know precisely how silly. Good lord. Do you want loud, colourful projectiles blowing previous you at elbow’s size at upwards of 180 miles per hour? Do you want trails of sparks, glowing brake rotors and vehicles spitting fireplace — even those that aren’t sporting dragon liveries? I don’t know that I’ve been to a different monitor that lets a daily paying buyer get nearer to the motion than this one, or gives extra killer vantage factors from which to view the proceedings. It is vitally quick, and it solely will get extra spectacular when the solar goes down.
A particular place, and the pomp and circumstance of the accompanying ceremonies may truly outdo these of the Rolex 24 season opener. And like each IMSA occasion, the perfect half is likely to be the way in which you may gather little right-place-at-the-right-time moments simply strolling across the paddock or the infield. A cool previous Lister duplicate that nearer inspection reveals to be a Beck, the corporate well-known for his or her highly-regarded copy Porsche 550 Spyders, and the amiable octogenarian with the MAGA hat sitting on the fender seems to be Chuck Beck himself. Smiling 53-year-old Texan pole-sitter Ben Keating needs luck to his French rival Lilou Wadoux, the Ferrari manufacturing unit driver thirty years his junior, on his well beyond the AF Corse storage. A boy in a wheelchair, possibly ten years previous, will get a photograph with Robert Wickens’ hand-controlled Hyundai TCR. 5-time Le Mans-winner Derek Bell holds courtroom backstage with the present crop of drivers as they await their second in the course of the pre-race introductions — a backstage I’ve no enterprise being in, by the way in which, only a roped off space behind the flatbed the place you or anyone else might stroll over and be granted an an identical perspective.
For higher or worse, it received’t at all times be like this. Both IMSA will continue to grow at the price of at the least some half this extraordinary stage of accessibility, or the traditionally cyclical nature of sports activities automotive racing, the place rising prices inevitably intersect with diminishing returns, will sooner or later meet up with it, whereupon the pendulum swings again from big-budget producer applications to smaller privateer efforts — it’s a fragile equilibrium that the present ruleset appears to be doing an excellent job of sustaining, for the second at the least. However now can be a superb time to begin planning for 2025. They name them golden eras as a result of they don’t final perpetually, and the one we’re watching proper now’s about as golden as they arrive.
