On a warm, late spring day near the city of New Orleans, the one thing that was on my mind when I had the opportunity to meet with Turner Motorsport founder and team principal Will Turner was…driver ratings.
Inevitably, any discussion of pro-am sports car racing that implements the FIA Driver Categorisation system (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum) will have to approach this subject, which sometimes incites provocative comments on the matter – be it from competitors who have skin in the game and need to achieve results in their respective categories to keep their racing dreams alive, or from a gallery of fans and observers who either have a genuine desire for fair play, or who want nothing more than to argue for argument’s sake.
Before the SRO America series went to NOLA Motorsport Park in May, the series made a change to the GT World Challenge America’s Pro category, requiring every team carry one Silver-rated driver in each car. This changed forced the separation of K-PAX Racing’s Pro category lineup of Andrea Caldarelli and Jordan Pepper, who easily won the 2021 GT World Challenge America Pro title, and swept the first weekend of the 2022 season at Sonoma Raceway with a similar level of ease.
It was the second time in as many weekends that the sore subject of driver ratings had been a talking point of a GTWCA race meeting. The first occasion directly involved Turner Motorsport, who learned with just minutes before the first race of their season that Michael Dinan’s provisional Bronze categorisation had been bumped up to Silver, and that he and Robby Foley would be moving up from Pro-Am to Pro class – against the wishes of the team.
It’s been a lot for Turner and his team to process, and going into the NOLA weekend, he wasn’t completely sure what to make of it all.
“We don’t know how this is going to impact us,” Turner said of the latest regulations change from the SRO. “We do know that splitting up those guys took care of one problem,” he added, referring, of course, to the Caldarelli/Pepper lineup at K-PAX.
“On paper, It’s a great thing. Because if you’re truly a Bronze, and then the Silvers are out of the Bronze class, you’ll come here and you’ll be able to win as a Bronze, right? And then the other way, if you’re truly a Silver – which, we have a true silver here,” Turner says, gesturing towards Dinan, “you have a chance of winning the Pro class. So on paper, it’s great.”
Then, Foley – the former high school football player from New Jersey, turned BMW factory racing driver and coach, offered his view on the matter: “Basically there was one car that was a problem.”
“There’s a bunch of customers that run in this series that are true Silvers. So this was a solution to a problem, to make the Pro class more competitive. They either needed to have a Silver class – and then have one Pro car – or change the Pro class. So they went with changing the Pro class. We need to see, basically, where it is. But it’s in an effort to grow the series, and keep, I think, current people here, give them a place to race fairly.”
On face value, being bumped up to GT World Challenge America’s top class wouldn’t seem like a negative. Turner Motorsport already had a heritage of success in the series’ forerunners, particularly back in the late ’90s and early 2000s when it was Turner himself at the wheel of their signature yellow and blue BMW touring cars. They’re one of the top teams in IMSA’s ultra-competitive GT3 class known as GT Daytona (GT3).
And when they returned to GT World Challenge America full-time in 2021, Dinan and Foley raced the whole season in the Pro category. They even got an overall victory in the second race at Road America, last August – one of the few races not won by the mighty “CaldaPepper” tandem last year.
But Turner wanted more competition. And Dinan, the 23-year-old university student turned racing driver from New York City, was especially looking forward to racing in a much larger Pro-Am field in 2022 – and was just as surprised at the move to Pro class as everyone else was, particularly with the timing of it all.
“Initially this wasn’t really a concern to us,” said Dinan. “[SRO America] said, we have all these young Silvers, we’ll just derogate you guys to racing Pro-Am: Myself, Chandler Hall (of BimmerWorld Racing), Samantha Tan, Misha Goikhberg (of K-PAX Racing), et cetera.”
“And then we got to Sonoma, and that’s when, obviously, this all became a problem. Because five minutes before the race, you know, I’m getting in the car and they go – ‘Oh, by the way, we’re now in the Pro class.'”
“There’s a lot of great series around the world right now. Sports car racing is, you know, arguably at an all time high. There’s some really competitive, good places to race. We specifically didn’t want to come back this year to run in a three-car Pro Class against Caldarelli and Pepper.”
Before the change ahead of the New Orleans weekend, the question wasn’t whether Caldarelli and Pepper were going to win another set of Pro titles together at K-PAX – but if they were going to run the table and win every race to do it.
“And that’s why after what happened in Sonoma, we kind of said: ‘If we’re going to run in this championship, there has to be a change made,'” Dinan added. “And I think it was not just for our benefit, but for the series and the fans. We saw what happened in Sonoma – the car was over a minute ahead of the field, and then won both races. It’s not fun for anybody to watch.”
“There’s not a lot of incentive,” said Foley, in reference to his team and some others. “The wind is out of your sails, for everybody else. And if you look at all the other lineups that were in Pro, there is one legitimate silver, that could be ‘Driver 1’. So it’s not good for the health of the championship.”
“I think you’ll see more people either move up from GT4,” says Foley – who along with Dinan, won the 2020 GT4 America Pro-Am title before stepping up to GTWCA last year, “or come from other places to race against similar competition.”
With hindsight, it’s easy to say that these changes could have been implemented before the season began, and it would have de-escalated the whole situation. Nonetheless, a change has been made in the interest of ensuring a more competitive Pro Cup category going forward. Gold-rated Jordan Pepper was moved over to K-PAX’s second car – which had also been moved up from Pro-Am to Pro at Sonoma, following a review of Goikhberg’s own driver categorisation – while Silver-rated Michele Beretta was plugged in to replace Pepper alongside Caldarelli.
Problem solved, right? On paper, according to Turner – but whether or not it’s been solved in practice, is still up for debate. They weren’t entirely sure going into the weekend’s two 90-minute sprint races.
“The thing that haunts the rest of the world, is kind of haunting us too: How do you define ‘Silver’?” Turner asks. “And there are ‘fake silvers’ or ‘slippery silvers’, whatever we call them, that kind of mess things up for everybody.”
Those who’ve been following GT World Challenge America this year could logicaly infer that the likes of Goikhberg, who has some prototype experience as an am driver – and Aghakhani, who is probably still known today for getting his first taste of Lamborghini racing at age 14, wouldn’t be flagged as ‘fake’ or ‘slippery’ or ‘plastic’ silvers. Certainly not Dinan, whose career began driving Mazda MX-5s at the clubsport level in 2018, while he was still studying business and engineering in university.
At NOLA, Dinan and Foley suffered through a frustrating weekend where they scored zero points. Foley knocked out of Race 1 after contact with US Racetronics’ Loris Spinelli in a battle for position, then in Race 2, Dinan pulled off the track after a drivetrain failure. Zero points for the weekend was already a bitter pill to swallow.
Meanwhile, the newly-acquired Beretta – a second-generation driver with multiple seasons of experience in reputable junior formula series before he made the change to GT racing – assisted Caldarelli to another weekend sweep in the black #1 K-PAX Lamborghini.
“If they did hire a fake silver, now – and their performance is that of a Gold or a Pro, then it didn’t really help our situation,” Turner said. “So we’re back in the same place we were.”
These sorts of touchy debates will likely never go away, as long as any big-time sports car racing series has a driver categorisation system like the FIA’s. In the SRO series, at least, they’ll be here until 2023 – when a new, bespoke driver categorisation system is expected to debut and, in theory, correct the biggest pain points of the FIA’s system.
For Turner Motorsport and their GT World Challenge America programme, it’s hard not to imagine that they now have more questions than answers in this matter, which is now out of their control.
Part two will arrive tomorrow.
Images © BMW, SRO Motorsports Group America
