The 27th annual Motul Petit Le Mans is underway on a beautiful Saturday afternoon at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta – sunny and clear, ambient temperatures just around 23°C, perfect weather for a ten-hour endurance race. A purported record crowd of tens of thousands of racing fans gathered upon Road Atlanta for this final round of the IMSA season, and saw the field of 53 cars streak off as they took the green flag.
Polesitter Jack Aitken took the early initiative in his #31 Cadillac, while Connor de Phillippi’s BMW slipped past Matt Campbell’s Porsche to grab second place into turn one. In less than seven minutes, the GTP leaders encountered GT traffic for the first time – multi-class, Atlanta rush hour traffic had begun!
The pink #01 Cadillac Racing V-Series.R was the first GTP car to hit some sort of trouble, receiving a mechanical black flag for a powertrain parameters infringment shortly after the car got its first warning – the culprit was an issue with the torque sensor itself.
Everything was clean wheel-to-wheel though, right until the 20-minute mark. Scott Andrews – the polesitter and runaway leader in the GTD class to that point – slid off into the gravel at turn five, and brought out the first Full Course Yellow while the safety team retrieved his stranded #80 Lone Star Racing Mercedes-AMG GT3.
Simultaneously, John Potter reported a mechanical issue on the #44 Magnus Racing Aston Martin Vantage and came down to the pits, fearing a broken left-side driveshaft – the car was pushed behind the wall.
With the first Safety Car intervention so early, most teams came to the pits but the #40 WTRAndretti Acura of Jordan Taylor and the #24 BMW of Philipp Eng stayed out to go off-sequence. It also allowed the #01 Cadillac to get back on the lead lap.
The race restarted again after 33 minutes, where the #20 High Class Racing ORECA LMP2 was called into the pits for speeding in the pits. Madison Snow had a close call when he slid off into the gravel at turn 10A, but he was able to gather it back up and rejoin the race in his #1 Paul Miller Racing BMW.
As the younger Taylor pulled away from the field in his ruby red #40 Acura, Alessio Picariello in the #5 Mustang Sampling Proton Competition Porsche made a bid for the ‘net’ lead by getting past the Cadillac of Aitken for second place. But Aitken fought back the challenge of the #6 Penske Porsche of Nick Tandy then got past Picariello to regain second.
Taylor leads at the top of the hour, by just over ten seconds from Aitken, Picariello, and Tandy, as the rest of the opening hour has run without any other major incidents.
Ben Keating has been in control of LMP2 since the green flag dropped, leading the class in his #2 United Autosports USA ORECA, from TDS Racing’s Steven Thomas, then Nick Boulle for Inter Europol by PR1 Mathiasen.
The #65 Ford Multimatic Motorsports Mustang GT3 of Frederic Vervisch and the #62 Risi Competizione Ferrari 296 GT3 of Daniel Serra lead GTD Pro after staying out of the pits during the first Safety Car period. Laurin Heinrich is third in the #77 AO Racing ‘Rexy’ Porsche.
Mercedes remains up front in GTD as Mike Skeen now leads in the #32 Korthoff/Preston Motorsports machine, from the Cetilar Racing Ferrari of Giorgio Sernagiotto and the Winward Racing Mercedes of Russell Ward.
And as of the first formation lap, Porsche has officially clinched the 2024 GTP Manufacturers’ Championship. It’s the German marque’s first IMSA premier class title since the unification of major American sports car racing in 2014.
Images © Jack Webster / Dailysportscar.com
