As the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship travels west to the streets of Long Beach, California for the first sprint race of the 2024 season – it’s hard not to think about the finish to last year’s race.
Porsche Penske Motorsports’ Mathieu Jaminet and Nick Tandy won the race and gave the Porsche 963 its first-ever win. Jaminet was put in a prime position to win thanks to a brave call from the pit wall not to change tyres on the only pit stop of the race.
But the Frenchman would still have to hold off a hard-charging Ricky Taylor, whose Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti Acura ARX-06 had taken four tyres and was carving his way through the field in the final minutes. It seemed inevitable that Taylor would make a move for the win – in fact, he’d made what appeared to be the race-winning move! But Taylor’s lunge up the inside of Jaminet on the penultimate lap was over the limit of adhesion, and his and Filipe Albuquerque’s races ended in the tyre barriers while Jaminet took the chequered flag first behind the Safety Car.
A year later, both the #6 Penske Porsche of Jaminet and Tandy and the #10 WTRAndretti Acura ARX-06 of Taylor and Albuquerque head into Long Beach with many IMSA fans anticipating a rematch in this battle.
Jaminet took time to reflect on the 963’s first win and what it meant for a programme that, at the time, looked nothing like a union of two motorsport powerhouses in its first few months of racing. “Last year was really special, because we had a very tough start to the programme, to the season, on both our cars at both Daytona and Sebring. At Long Beach weekend last year, we did not expect to win after free practice and qualifying,” said the Frenchman.
“To bring the first win of the 963 is something that stays in the storybooks for the brand. So that was pretty cool for us on the #6 crew, because it was the work of everyone. The chance came from the pit stand having a good strategy, and the teamwork of car #7 with Matty Campbell – a good mate of mine – who defended and helped us for the win.
“In the end, it was perfect teamwork that day. It feels really special to have won that race.”
Jaminet and Tandy used that victory to put themselves into title contention to the end of the 2023 season – as the entire team improved rapidly as the season progressed.
Now in 2024, Porsche Penske 963s have already won twice this year across IMSA and FIA WEC and the union is delivering on its initial hype. But the main duo of the #6 Porsche, Jaminet and Tandy, rests in the middle of the IMSA GTP points table in sixth after two races at Daytona and Sebring were plagued with misfortune – a lot of it not of their own making.
“Looking at this year, for sure it would be great to repeat another win – I’m not sure many people or many teams have gone back-to-back in Long Beach!” Jaminet continues. “There’s more cars this year, the competition is tougher. We’ve got some knowledge with the soft tyre, which we haven’t really run so far in IMSA, other than Daytona in the night.
“It’s something very new and a new challenge. If we could get a good result and win this race, it would set up our championship again and come back at the front. It’s definitely something I want to have a good shot at, to try to bring another trophy home.”
Obviously, for the elder of the Taylor brothers, redemption is on his mind after such a crushing defeat. “I’m really excited to be going back,” he says. “I remember my first feeling after the race last year was ‘Gosh, I wish I could try this again.’ You don’t get a second chance in motorsports. So going back this year, I’ve been thinking about that moment for a year now. And I finally get a chance to go erase it from my memory, hopefully, this year.”
Asked if he’d go for the same move with the race on the line this year, Taylor responded: “It’s so situational. It didn’t seem like an overly aggressive move at the time. We were in a position in the championship where there was so much up in the air. It was so early, there wasn’t really much to gain or lose.
“And looking back on it, it cost us the championship. But there are a lot of other moments that also cost us the championship,” he said. “But yeah, I wouldn’t make the same move, obviously, because it didn’t work. I might have waited a lap or two longer knowing what I know now he was quite off the pace, and I might have had another chance at the time. You think you don’t have another shot. So I don’t blame myself for going for it last year, we really wanted to win the race – the second place was something we were interested in.”
Taylor and Albuquerque are on a 12-race winless drought dating back to the 2022 Road America round and have had a bit of a frustrating start to the 2024 season themselves – upstaged by the new #40 team anchored by his younger brother Jordan and Louis Delètraz to start the year.
“This year, we’re eighth in the championship. You can argue that we have less to lose,” Ricky says.
“And now, this year we need to get some points. We need a result. So we’re going to be aggressive – hopefully, that situation doesn’t happen again. Hopefully, we can get the pole and control the race from the lead. But even with one pitstop, a lot can happen. Hopefully, it’s not that exciting.”
The tactical element will also be something to watch in the GTP class. Porsche sacrificed performance late in the race to gain valuable track position around the technical Long Beach circuit – a place where overtaking opportunities are very limited with such tight confines and slim margins all around the track.
Now that Michelin has brought its Soft tyre compound to Long Beach for the GTP cars, instead of the Medium (formerly the Soft High Temperature/SHT compound), Porsche Penske Motorsports Managing Director Jonathan Diuguid isn’t quite as confident that a no-tyre exchange strategy will be the right call once again.
“I think it’s less likely,” Diuguid said of using last year’s winning strategy. “I’m not gonna say it’s totally off the table, because in the previous two years Long Beach has been relatively caution-free. I think with it being a street course – and we have two additional GTP cars relative to where we were last year, and more GT cars than we had last year too – I think the traffic is gonna be more of a concern, but I think anything’s on the table.
“I think you’ll see people deploying whatever they can to get track position on a tight circuit. Cars completing the race on one set of tyres is probably unlikely, but I think there will be other tyre strategies at play.”
And of course, with it being such a short race with only one pit stop needed to get to the end, whatever strategy a team commits to, the mechanics must execute the stop perfectly.
“The one negative about the race is it’s a short distance, so if you make a mistake, it’s difficult to recover,” Duiguid continues. “I think the positive about that is that the fuel and energy window is quite large, so there’s opportunities for people to stop and miss traffic and different things like that. For partial tyre changes, you’ll have some warm-up differences. The one thing that’s always been at the top of the strategy list for Long Beach is track position. We used that to our advantage last year and also used our two-car team to put both cars in a one-two position to control the race.
“I think you’ll be seeing teams and drivers looking at all the opportunities they have, managing traffic and track position to put themselves in a position to where they’re going to have to get passed to lose the race.”
Choosing the right time to come in will also be a factor, as Taylor points out: “I think there’s gonna be a lot more deg. Out laps are going to be really strong. I’m not a strategist, but obviously, the drivers are always throwing around ideas of, ‘Oh, we should undercut them-‘ but everybody’s going to try and undercut!
“So there’s gonna be a lot of people defending – and then, you know, who goes long? I think there’s definitely going to be people trying different stuff. And I don’t think it’s a full two stints. So there’s quite a bit of room to play – I think for a one-stop, it’s going to be pretty exciting (to see) what people do.”
The strategic element will also be a factor in the GTD class this weekend. Last year when both GTD Pro and GTD were at Long Beach, conventional four-tyre change strategies won the day for Vasser Sullivan Racing and Paul Miller Racing, respectively – timing, the pace of the out-laps, and clean pit work mattered most.
But Jack Hawksworth, last year’s GTD Pro Champion – who’s entering GTD in a one-off appearance alongside Frankie Montecalvo in the #12 Vasser Sullivan Lexus RC F GT3 – feels that there could be more strategies to play with this time out with teams being limited to just four sets of dry tyres this year, versus five sets in 2023.
“It’s definitely more of a talking point this year,” Hawksworth said of the strategy in his category. “Obviously, in GTD we have a different tyre.
“The tyres are more durable. It’ll definitely be a one-stop race. But what we do with tyres – whether we take four, whether we take two, or whether we take none – is going to depend on the level of degradation we see in practice. So at the minute, we’re waiting to see once we hit the track, what that looks like.”
Weather-wise, it should be another comfortable weekend of mostly sunny conditions in Southern California, leaving the threat of rain as a non-factor. The track will evolve rapidly from the first practice sessions onward and three different series will be running with three different brands of rubber being laid down.
There won’t be much time to ponder it all before Saturday evening’s 100-minute race – but it could be a very satisfying sprint.
Images © Richard Dole, Jake Galstad / IMSA
