After a difficult loss in last year’s IMSA Sahlen’s Six Hours of the Glen, this year, the Cadillac Whelen team took a commanding victory in Watkins Glen on Sunday – a win that has put the Action Express Racing team behind the #31 Cadillac V-Series.R, and its lead driver Jack Aitken, in firm control of its championship destiny.
Aitken, Earl Bamber, and Frederik Vesti collectively led 143 out of 182 laps in a race littered with accidents and calamities on their way to the #31 Cadillac’s second straight win in 2026, and an incredible eighth consecutive podium finish dating back to the end of the 2025 season.
“The car was fantastic today,” said Aitken, who started and finished the race for the Cadillac Whelen team. “Another great performance from the Whelen Cadillac guys, and my teammates who were out front pretty much the whole race, in some form or another. It’s a real pleasure, and it feels a bit surreal to keep the streak going.”
All three drivers took turns leading laps but with a little over 90 minutes left in the race, one cross-class incident could have eliminated them from contention.
Towards the end of Bamber’s last stint, the Kiwi was fending off Sheldon van der Linde in the #24 BMW M Team WRT Hybrid V8 in a tense battle for the lead. As the GTP leaders went through the esses, Bamber and the #21 AF Corse Ferrari 296 GT3 Evo made side-to-side contact, sending the GTD class Ferrari and driver Simon Mann into the guardrail.
Bamber blamed the incident on dirty air from an LMP2 car directly in front of him, saying: “I mean, I got in the tow of the Tower (Motorsports LMP2) car, I followed it up – and then I was inside of the Ferrari. I got a little bit of aero wash and then he touched in the tail. It was just a very slight touch,” said Bamber about the collision between turns three and four.
A loss of momentum allowed van der Linde to pass Bamber with his two left wheels on the grass for the lead, and then when the #93 Acura Meyer Shank Racing ARX-06 and #10 Wayne Taylor Racing Cadillac pitted before the full course yellow came out, the #31 Cadillac had lost control of the race for the first time.
Watkins Glen was certainly an untidy race this year, littered with incidents and a fair share of penalties for collisions and pit work violations – but this collision between Bamber and Mann was never investigated, and thus never subject to a decision of whether or not to render a penalty.
It ended up being a very fortunate break for Aitken once he got in the car for the last hour and 12 minutes of green flag racing. He took the restart third after jumping ahead of the #24 BMW during a round of pit stops under safety car.
“The way it worked out, we had a couple of cars in front of us with a bit of an advantage, stopping just before the yellow came out,” Aitken recalled. “We knew we had a bit of a fuel advantage, so it’s just trying to stay close to them and keep saving fuel. See if we could get by, if there were any opportunities.”
There were some intra-squad tactics in play from Cadillac, who asked Filipe Albuquerque in the #10 WTR Cadillac to let Aitken through as the #31 began to show superior pace. Once the swap for second was made, only Nick Yelloly in the #93 MSR Acura was ahead, and Aitken reset the fastest lap of the race to try and keep the Acura in reach.
“I think at the next pit stop sequence, the team played it pretty much perfectly,” Aitken said, after getting a rapid pit stop for fuel and two tyres. MSR needed to put more fuel into the #93 Acura, which cost them their lead.
“So we got out with a decent gap, and we were able to just manage it from there. We kind of just made sure we were taking care of the car and managing the traffic – which is always a lot of fun here, but quite scary at times!”
A final-lap crash between two GTD Pro cars afforded Aitken the chance to coast over the line to victory.
The win erased the sting of losing the win on the last lap at Watkins Glen last year, when the #31 Whelen Cadillac ran out of fuel coming to the white flag – as well as the more recent pain of Aitken and Bamber’s DNF at the 24 Hours of Le Mans just two weeks ago.
“You have to just chalk it up as a learning experience sometimes on a day like that,” Aitken recalled of last year’s finish.
“We haven’t made mistakes like that in a long time, and that’s part of the reason we’re on this (podium) streak. It is lovely to do it right, and come back and win it. Because you never know when you’re going to get a chance to win these big races, so it’s fantastic.”
Thanks to that podium streak, the #31 Cadillac Whelen team leads the GTP Teams’ Championship by 245 points over the #93 MSR Acura, with the two Porsche Penske cars down in third and fourth, trailing by 258 and 371 points respectively. Aitken, who’s been the team’s only driver to run every race in IMSA, leads Porsche works driver Laurin Heinrich (who’s split the season between Porsche Penske Motorsport and JDC-Miller MotorSports) by 203 points in the Drivers’ Championship, followed by Acura MSR’s Renger van der Zande and Nick Yelloly, and Porsche Penske’s Felipe Nasr and Julien Andlauer.
There’s only three races left on the calendar featuring the premier GTP class, and in IMSA’s plentiful points system, those championship leads for the team and for Aitken cannot be overturned in the upcoming Motul SportsCar Endurance Grand Prix at Road America on 2 August. Cadillac’s 80-point lead in the manufacturer’s championship is also a big one in the context of the five-make race.
Porsche Penske Motorsport has won every GTP championship in IMSA the last two years, but with two-thirds of their season already done, it would take a significant collapse for Aitken, Bamber, Vesti, and the Cadillac Whelen/Action Express team to lose out on regaining the title for the first time in three years – with or without the influence of a Balance of Performance adjustment.
And in the form that the team and its drivers have been in lately, that’ll be a hard task to pull off – even for Porsche and Penske.
Images © Jack Webster / dailysportscar.com
