
By David Phillips, IMSA Wire Service
Just a hop skip and a jump from the Detroit Street Circuit’s Turn 3 you’ll find a statue of Joe Lewis, with the monument known as “The Fist” celebrating hometown icon and one of boxing’s most celebrated heavyweight champions. “The Brown Bomber’s” presence so close to the temporary racetrack is entirely fitting, for the tight confines of the nine-turn, 1.645-mile circuit proved to be the ideal setting for that most pugilistic contest of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season.
BoP Adjustments Validated
The mid-season adjustments to the Balance of Performance regulations in both Grand Touring Prototype (GTP) and Grand Touring Daytona Pro (GTD PRO) were evidently right on the mark. On the GTP front, the heretofore struggling Acura Meyer Shank Racing w/Curb-Agajanian Acura ARX-06s locked-out the front row of the grid while the No. 10 Cadillac Wayne Taylor Racing Cadillac V-Series.R looked a potential winner before van der Zande’s late race heroics. The Porsche Penske Motorsport Porsche 963s were still very much in the mix throughout the race; likewise the BMW M Hybrid V8s still had plenty of pace, witness the fact that the four-time pole winners monopolized the second row of the grid and the No. 24 BMW M Team RLL entry finished just seven seconds adrift of the winning Acura.
As for GTD PRO, five manufacturers ran in the top seven spots covered only by 6.2 seconds with 15 minutes remaining in the 100-minute race. While a full-course caution soon after the one-hour mark played a part in keeping things close, all of Ford, Corvette, Lamborghini, Porsche and Lexus had legitimate podium chances.
The Right Kind of Fight
Saturday’s race seemed to provide just the right balance of competitors blending aggression and precision on both GTP and GTD PRO podiums.
Acura MSR’s Renger van der Zande was nothing if not superb in first passing an off-balance Felipe Nasr in the No. 7 Porsche Penske Motorsport Porsche 963 to take second spot, then executing a letter perfect overtake on Ricky Taylor in the No. 10 Cadillac to grab a lead the No. 93 Acura was destined to maintain to the finish.
For his part, Taylor was no less brilliant, having given the leading Porsche the most gentle of taps at Turn 3 – reviewed with no action by IMSA race officials – before scything past Nasr with a breathtaking maneuver at the following corner, catching the Penske driver off-guard and allowing not only van der Zande to pass as well, but also Penske teammate Mathieu Jaminet in the No. 6 Porsche.
Meanwhile, GTD PRO winners Seb Priaulx and Mike Rockenfeller barely put a foot wrong. Starting from pole, they led 55 of 81 laps in what was inevitably a hectic race given they were tasked with staying clear of the faster GTP machines while they battled their class competition. That their No. 64 Ford Multimatic Motorsports Ford Mustang GT3 completed the contest with barely a mark on it was testimony to their winning cocktail of speed, aggression and patience.
Putting the “Classic” in “Sports Car Classic”
It’s sometimes hard to define what a “classic” race is, especially when a race has an eclectic, rather than consistent, history as IMSA does in Detroit across both the new downtown Renaissance Center circuit and its previous location on Belle Isle Park. But while IndyCars serve as the Sunday main course to the Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix weekend, it’s apparent the IMSA sports car race appetizer is the setup that starts a great, complete weekend meal.
Sports cars appear, perhaps surprisingly, well-suited to the claustrophobic confines of these concrete canyons where “rubbin’ is racing.” Let’s face it: incidental contact is virtually inevitable when high-profile athletes are turned loose in high-powered race cars on bumpy, narrow city streets shrink-wrapped in cement barriers. Even if the closed-wheeled cars trade wraps and the combatants live to survive another day, the battle scars can loom large. Officials have a fine line to tread between assessing penalties versus letting everyone race, but no incidents this year seemed malicious and it led to a highly entertaining race.
In the post-weekend press conference, even Detroit event officials were surprised – pleasantly so – at how well these big sports cars raced and handled the treacherous track.
“I didn’t think those large GTP cars would be able to pass as much as they did at this track. Turn 1 is 27 feet wide. It’s narrow,” said Bud Denker, President of Penske Corporation, Roger Penske’s longtime righthand man and one of the two key Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix event leads along with Michael Montri.
“But you saw some banging and some clanking off those cars yesterday in GTP and GT that we haven’t seen before. I’m not sure how many passes there were yesterday, but we saw a bunch.
“For the fans to see that, the kind of racing, bumping through the last couple laps of the race, I think the Cadillac got passed with three or four laps to go in the race. It was a great pass. The Porsche got bumped out of the way with about 10 laps to go in the race in Turn 3.
“Really, really solid racing, and it just goes to the fact that, yeah, it’s bumpy, but boy, it’s competitive as hell in terms of what it does. I also think it separates the great drivers from good drivers in many cases, too, so I think that’s clearly something that we like to see.”
So, back to that “classic” term. Saturday’s Chevrolet Detroit Sports Car Classic was a compelling example of how competitive and compelling sports cars can be on a challenging street circuit, where overtaking opportunities are at a premium. Incidents were more often a product of the minor misjudgments that inevitably occur in a street race environment.
Not only did few (if any) of those misjudgments result in terminal damage to the competitors, it can be argued they also contributed to what was a hugely entertaining sports car race.
Is it really 10 more months until the next IMSA street race?
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