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What Surprise Will WeatherTech Raceway Serve Up in GTD PRO?

No. 3 Corvette Takes Lead Over No. 9 Porsche in Championship Standings, but It’s Been Anything but Predictable

By John Oreovicz

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – It’s fair to say that no one knew what to really expect from the new GTD PRO class of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship in 2022.

The first three rounds of the campaign have certainly served up plenty of intrigue and excitement. And it seems like Pfaff Motorsports and Corvette Racing have been at the center of the action.

In the season-opening Rolex 24 At Daytona, Mathieu Jaminet was victorious in Pfaff’s No. 9 Porsche 911 GT3 R after a memorable, door-banging, last-lap duel with another Porsche fielded by KC Motorsport Group that still has racing fans around the world talking.

The No. 3 Corvette Racing Corvette C8.R GTD was the class of the GTD PRO field on the way to taking the class win in the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring Presented by Advance Auto Parts. Then most recently at the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach, the fortunes of Pfaff and Corvette became intertwined in a bizarre pit lane incident that has become another internet sensation, allowing the No. 23 Heart of Racing Team Aston Martin Vantage GT3 to claim the win.

All the ups and downs to date have left the Corvette duo of Jordan Taylor and Antonio Garcia holding a 30-point lead in the GTD PRO standings over Pfaff’s Jaminet and Matt Campbell heading into this weekend’s Hyundai Monterey Sports Car Championship Presented by Motul at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. The No. 14 Vasser Sullivan Lexus RC F GT3 with drivers Ben Barnicoat and Jack Hawksworth lies third in the standings, 71 points in arrears of the Corvette duo.

Sunday’s race at WeatherTech Raceway is the last for GTD PRO until the Sahlen’s Six Hours of The Glen at Watkins Glen International in late June. It offers Jaminet and the Pfaff team one more opportunity to close the points gap prior to the break.

“At the moment, it seems for sure that the Corvette is the car to beat, at Sebring and Long Beach,” Jaminet observed. “The performance they showed at the last two rounds is pretty impressive. They look a little bit ahead of the rest of the field. They seem to have an advantage in performance and also in tire degradation. That’s an area where we struggle quite a bit with the Porsche.

“But from our side, we feel pretty confident that the Porsche will be somehow up there,” Jaminet continued. “We’ve had three clean runs, though it’s unfortunate what happened at Long Beach. But we’ve had good pit stops, good execution and the car is spot-on. We just need to keep working hard, keep on doing our job.”

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Ah yes, what happened at Long Beach. The No. 9 Porsche and No. 3 Corvette made their only pit stops of the 100-minute contest on the same lap nose to tail, in adjoining pit boxes. During the stop, one of the Corvette’s wheel nuts flew out of the pneumatic gun used to remove and reinsert the nut during a tire change. The nut made a slow, looping arc over the roof of the Porsche before landing in the Pfaff car’s radiator just hard enough to create a small puncture and cause a leak. (The photo at right shows the flying wheel nut about to drop into the opening on the Porsche’s hood as the car is being refueled.)

The freak episode knocked the Porsche out of the race and incurred a drive-through penalty for the Corvette, from which Garcia recovered to finish third.

Like the last lap at Daytona, people are still talking about the rogue Corvette wheel nut.

“Initially, I did not understand why the car was not leaving the pits,” Jaminet said. “I started to get a bit angry about what was happening. Suddenly, I realized when I started the engine, water was going up out of the radiator and onto the windshield. The refueler saw (the wheel nut) coming, so he could explain it to us, and then we saw the video. We could clearly see what happened and for sure it was a lot of emotion because we had a good pit stop and it was looking like a P2 finish for us. It’s disappointing, but these things can happen. We move on.”

Garcia was confused why he had to serve a penalty and didn’t truly understand until he also saw video footage of the unlikely projectile and its crazy flight path.

“For sure, that’s the unluckiest thing. … You could try a million times or more and never do that again,” he said.

Like Jaminet, Garcia expects the Corvette to be competitive again at WeatherTech Raceway. The 41-year-old Spaniard is a three-time winner at the picturesque California road course. Corvette is also strong at the track with eight wins.

“Laguna has been good for me and always good for Corvette Racing,” Garcia said. “This year, every time we go to a different racetrack it’s a new challenge because we don’t know how this new version of the car will behave. We are always learning about the control tire at each racetrack, how to make it work.

“So far it has been going really, really good, so I don’t see anything going against us that would prevent us from fighting for the win or a good result.”

The Hyundai Monterey Sports Car Championship schedule shows WeatherTech Championship practices on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, ahead of qualifying at 3:45 p.m. ET Saturday (livestream on IMSA.com/TVLive).

The race airs live at 3 p.m. Sunday on NBC.