North American Motorsport kickoff

     This years running of the Rolex 24 is one for the books and yet another reminder that we are in a golden era as far as endurance racing goes. After the few dark years of the grand am Rolex sports car series and the American lemans series, I can honestly say the events that I am seeing on the race track whenever this series races is amazing. We witnessed fights for the lead from the 1st hour all the way to the 23rd hour and 58th minute (more on that later). This year even featured the highest attendance in history of the Rolex 24, and I’m pretty sure it left the fans wanting more.

     Without further ado, let’s get into this one. Honestly the first thing that I would want to point out is IMSA truly has bang for your buck experiences. The fans at the track are truly the winners every year with the amount of stuff that they can do with even a general admission ticket. This is one of a few reasons I believe The Rolex 24 received the highest attendance ever this year, along with the racing to go along with it. To see a 24 hour race come down to the last few minutes time after time again, that’s a great selling point as to why someone would want to buy a ticket.

    To start things off in GTP we had the no.31 Action Express Racing Cadillac being driven by Pipo Derani, and the No.01 chip Ginassi Cadillac being driven by Sébastien Bourdias lead the field to green. For GTD we have Michael Christensen leading the field to green in the popular green Rexy  Porsche for AO racing. 

     Things got off to a tense start as we had a few LMP2 entries get into crashes early, and one crash proved to be significant as while already under safety car conditions for a multi car crash in the lemans bus stop involving LMP2 cars , a LMP2 car crashed in turn 1 and the top Lexus car in GTD, being driven by mike Conway got collected into the incident effectively ending his race. You can call the first 4 hours of this race a little argy bargy but things would calm down as we settled into the night.

    One thing I noticed as we carried along was the reminder that this is an endurance race and not a sprint. IMSA endurance racing has really picked up the pace in the last few years to where now we have constant battling for position when there’s still double digit hours left to go and that was certainly the case over this weekend. That case in my opinion also allowed some drivers and teams to use up their stuff or make costly errors. One car I would like to mention is the No. 01 Cadillac that had what I believe an electrical issue along with the No.24 BMW in GTP effectively ending the 01s race and making the 24 have to play catch up. With the new engines and technology and how to power up these cars especially with the hybrids, we also saw some penalties as well. The Porsche Penske No.6 had a stop and go for adding too much energy to the car which basically made them retire. The LMP2 No.33 Ligier had several stops on track that produced a few full course yellows as well, but overall the night was rather clean.

       Now it’s morning and now we have a young prospect making headlines. This young man is only 17 years old but Connor Zilisch stole the show in LMP2, racing against seasoned vets from all forms of Motorsport, but was able to go wheel to wheel for the lead and even hold his own as with 6 hours left, he and the No.04 of Malthe Jakobsen were side by side at some of the hardest parts of the race track and Zilisch was able to move ahead and not look back.

     The events listed above only led to one of the most entertaining and intense battles that I have ever seen in endurance racing. The No.31 and the No.7 basically spent the last 6 or so hours fighting each other for the GTP win making some very daring passes while GTD was insane.

     So hours turn to minutes and we have a crazy fight for the top stop in class. What could go wrong? The pole sitting GTD car caught on fire after its final stop which led to the GTP cars pitting. The 31 came in ahead of the 7 but pit stops switched it and the 7 was able to get the jump on the restart. However due to traffic the 7 was able to continue to pull away until the last few laps of the race and then…..chaos followed.

      So the clock displayed 2 to go and shortly after the checkered flag was displayed.  The overall class battle is over and the No.7 Porsche Penske wins a Rolex for the caption for the first time since the 60s. Era Motorsport was able to win in LMP2 with 17 year old Connor Zilisch becoming I believe the youngest ever to win the Rolex 24……17.  Win ware racing won in GTD with Risi Competizone winning in GTD Pro.

      So once again another Rolex 24 is in the books and the Motorsport calendar is off to a roaring start.  Next up for the IMSA Weather Tech Endurance Championship? We head to Sebring. What’s next for me? It’s time for NASCAR as the Clash runs this weekend. Hopefully you enjoy the read and hopefully you are now more hooked than ever before on sports car racing and endurance Motorsport.

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