A pink Cadillac going 170 mph at the hours of darkness with no headlights gained Petit Le Mans this previous weekend. I used to be fortunate sufficient to be staring out of a set 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 mild, and within the time it took to articulate the thought, “Who the—?” it turned obvious that the automobile with no lights was certainly the race-leading 01 Chip Ganassi Racing V-Sequence.R piloted by a presumably wide-eyed Renger van der Zande. Lights or no lights, he didn’t raise, 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 pals.
Miraculously, simply as John Hindaugh within the press field beneath 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 remaining 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 outcome made for an unexpectedly joyful ending to a remaining 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 stated for his full-season co-driver Sebastian Bourdais. However, along with Scott Dixon they definitely made their closing efficiency within the 01 automobile a memorable one.
The temper within the Acura suite from which I witnessed the above was extra subdued. Of their remaining outings earlier than Meyer Shank and HRC assume the Acura helm subsequent yr, every of the WTR ARX-06s led the race at occasions. With lower than an hour remaining, Ricky Taylor within the blue quantity 10 automobile had simply taken the lead from Nick Tandy’s Porsche 963 when a deadstick Proton Mustang appeared in his path, too late to be averted. Fortunately nobody was significantly 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 remaining hours of this race for a second yr working was evident in a gut-wrenching interview again within the WTR storage. Robust stuff.
The manufacturing unit 963s rounded out the GTP podium, the quantity 7 automobile of Dane Cameron and Felipe Nasr ending third and clinching the championship after a season that appeared much more like what one would possibly’ve anticipated when information first broke of a Penske-Porsche partnership than final yr’s considerably shaky begin.
We’d not but be seeing fairly the Nineteen Eighties-level world dominance of their 956 and 962 forebears (and even the more moderen success of the 919s), however each right here and within the WEC, the Penske Porsches made it clear in 2024 that they’re the group 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 troublesome day for the previous and a podium for the group 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 best way again in January.
This yr’s version of the Petit — with attendance up higher than 10% over final yr per IMSA’s John Doonan, and the largest crowd one fellow garage-gawker who’d been coming because the inaugural working again in 1998 instructed me he’d ever seen — additionally tied a bow on one other stunningly profitable yr for the sequence. It’s turning into more and more tough to argue with the concept sports activities automobile and endurance racing within the U.S. has by no means been more healthy, with packed grids, sick vehicles, gifted 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 yr, and nonetheless extra producers (Hyundai, Mercedes-AMG, McLaren?) both overtly discussing or rumored to be planning top-level prototype efforts, the get together exhibits no indicators of slowing down. Even Cupra — the high-performance Seat spinoff model stated to be planning an entry into the U.S. market by decade’s finish — had a TCR automobile on show, with which they hope to affix the Michelin Pilot Problem subsequent season. Apparently IMSA is so good at this level that they’re inventing new automobile corporations simply to compete in it!
And really, there may not be a greater venue to showcase all of it than Highway Atlanta. This author spent 4 years residing inside a straightforward day’s drive and by some means by no means made it down. I knew on the time that I used to be silly for not making an attempt tougher 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 offers extra killer vantage factors from which to view the proceedings. It is extremely 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 would possibly truly outdo these of the Rolex 24 season opener. And like each IMSA occasion, the perfect half is likely to be the best way you’ll be able to gather little right-place-at-the-right-time moments simply strolling across the paddock or the infield. A cool outdated 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 past the AF Corse storage. A boy in a wheelchair, possibly ten years outdated, will get a photograph with Robert Wickens’ hand-controlled Hyundai TCR. 5-time Le Mans-winner Derek Bell holds court docket backstage with the present crop of drivers as they await their second throughout the pre-race introductions — a backstage I’ve no enterprise being in, by the best way, 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 gained’t all the time be like this. Both IMSA will continue to grow at the price of at the very least some half this extraordinary stage of accessibility, or the traditionally cyclical nature of sports activities automobile racing, the place rising prices inevitably intersect with diminishing returns, will in some unspecified time in the future meet up with it, whereupon the pendulum swings again from big-budget producer packages 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 very 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 ceaselessly, and the one we’re watching proper now could be about as golden as they arrive.
