The Heart of Racing’s No. 23 Aston Martin Vantage GT3 may not have been the fastest GTD PRO car in today’s IMSA SportsCar Championship race at the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach.
But drivers Ross Gunn and Alex Riberas never put a wheel wrong and, in contrast to some of the competition, the Heart of Racing crew was flawless in the pits. As a result, Riberas took the checkered flag 1.4 seconds clear of Ben Barnicoat in the No. 14 Lexus RC F GT3 to claim the first GTD PRO win for Aston Martin and the Heart of Racing squad.
“We had a very clean race,” said Gunn. “We just chipped away at it and made no mistakes, then this guy (Riberas) was awesome and brought it home.”
Riberas had his work cut out in the final stint, as a series of full-course cautions repeatedly negated any advantage he had been able to eke-out over the second placed Lexus.
“It’s hard not to have your rhythm disrupted with all those yellows,” said Riberas, who posted the best lap of the race for the winning car at 1 minute, 19.010 seconds. “I just had to focus on not overthinking things and get back in my rhythm on the restarts.”
Barnicoat and Jack Hawksworth drove a similarly clean race and the Vasser Sullivan Racing crew executed their lone pit stop to perfection, enabling the No. 14 Lexus to come home 1.4 seconds adrift of the winners.
Things weren’t as smooth for the third place No. 3 Corvette Racing Chevrolet Corvette C8.R GTD. Having started from pole and led the first third of the race, Jordan Taylor brought the ‘Vette into the pits for fuel and tires on Lap 29. In a strange sequence of events during the tire change, one of the Corvette’s wheel nuts rolled into pit lane into the path of Mathieu Jaminet in the No. 9 Pfaff Motorsports Porsche GT3 R which was running third in class at the time. The wayward nut punctured the Porsche’s radiator, knocking the car out of the race and resulting in a drive-through penalty to the Corvette Racing entry.
Setting fastest lap of the GTD PRO race at 1:18.807 and aided by the succession of full-course yellows, Antonio Garcia closed the Corvette within striking distance of the two leaders before settling for third place.
Corvette Racing wasn’t alone in losing a chance at victory in pit lane. Connor De Phillippi had assumed the top spot in the No. 25 BMW Team RLL BMW M4 GT3 when the Corvette, Porsche, Lexus and Aston Martin all pitted on Lap 29. The BMW went until Lap 46 before pitting, only for the driver’s door to work loose during the driver exchange between De Phillippi and John Edwards.
Understandably perhaps, De Phillippi set to re-attaching the door while the Team RLL mechanics changed tires and re-fueled the car. In effect, De Phillippi became extra personnel “working” on the car, thus IMSA penalized the team for having an extra team member over the pit wall during the pit stop, putting paid to Team RLL’s hopes for a win.
What’s more, Edwards took over in the car with less than 35 minutes remaining, which was the required minimum drive time for GTD PRO in this race. As a result, the No. 25 BMW was classified last in GTD PRO, promoting the No. 79 WeatherTech Racing Mercedes-AMG GT3 to a fourth-place finish.