All crews hoping for some more of this as IMSA makes its way to Road America! (UPDATED)

Sunday, August 01, 2021

Road America in Wisconsin is the venue for the next round of the 2021 IMSA Weathertech Sportscar Championship and the supporting Michelin Pilot Challenge next weekend after another successful round for the GT3 and GT4 cars from the Aston Martin Racing stable last time out at Lime Rock Park.

Aston Martin Racing driver Ross Gunn will continue his hectic transatlantic schedule with the Heart of Racing team and others in Europe after racing at Watkins Glen twice, Monza in the European Le Mans Series, Lime Rock, British GT at Spa, the Spa 24 before then going back for this IMSA round at Road America all over consecutive weekends.

That workload is not present, not affecting the success that he and IMSA co-driver Roman de Angelis are currently sharing over in America since stepping up to replace team principal Ian James (who is at the Spa 24 with Gunn this weekend) in the car with podium finishes in all of the last four rounds for the #23 AMR Vantage GT3 to lead the GTD Championship outright going into this round with five more rounds to come (including this one at Road America).

Lime Rock was the crews first lights to flag class win!

This weekend’s race will see the return of all the eligible IMSA classes after the GT only event at Lime Rock Park with the #23 Aston Martin being part of a fifteen car GTD grid with another thirty-four cars also competing around the four-mile circuit.

This 2hrs 40min race will run on Sunday 8th August.

UPDATE - Other US motorsport reporting outlets are today saying that the #23 AMR Vantage GTD will now be competing at Road America this weekend onwards with a Balance of Performance envelope that has lowered the cars available turbo boost throughout its range. That, and a slightly reduced fuel tank capacity will effectively slow the car slightly as well as shorten it maximum stint lengths bringing the car back into the midst of the GTD pack.

Then out before them over this race weekend will again be the GT4 and TCR cars from the Michelin Pilot Challenge Series where we believe that the Aston Martin entry level will be back up to three cars – one each from the Volt Racing with Archangel, Notlad Racing with Rennsport 1 and the Stoner Car Care team with Automatic Racing.

Their last race at Lime Rock Park was unfortunately something of a Safety Car ‘special’ with so many equally balanced cars competing around what was there, a very tight and twisting circuit – contact was almost inevitable. The long expanses of Road America should hopefully go somewhere to prevent any reoccurrence of that, so we have our fingers crossed.

Nevertheless, Lime Rock did produce a great race when they were able to and produced another podium finish for the #23 Notlad AMR Vantage GT4 of Pat Gallagher and Stevan McAleer who finish (this time second) with the #7 Volt Racing AMR of Alan Brynjolfsson and Trent Hindman in a not-too-distant P4.

The #7 car sits P8 in the Championship table some 300 points behind the leading BMW but with still four rounds to run (including Road America), that is a deficit that can still be easily covered if the results go their way.

These two cars are again set to battle it out at Road America amongst another large grid of twenty-four GT4 cars and thirteen TCR cars. The only addition to that is a late entry for the #99 Stoner Car Care Aston Martin with a revised driver line up of Ramin Abdolvahabi now racing with Michael de Quesada instead of the usual Rob Ecklin Jnr.