Can Volt Racing light up the preceedings at Road Atlanta and steal the MPC crown at the death?

Monday, November 08, 2021

 


Going hand in hand with the IMSA Weathertech Sportscar Championship as it does, the Michelin Pilot Challenge grid have also travelled to Road Atlanta for this weekend’s final – and Championship deciding round of their 2021 season.

Over the season with an Aston Martin Racing Vantage GT4 grid fluctuating between two and four cars, this weekend’s final will be with just two of them – the #7 Volt Racing with Archangel Vantage GT4 of Alan Brynjolfsson and Trent Hindman and the #23 Notlad Racing with RS1 for their drivers Patrick Gallagher and Stevan McAleer.


The bright yellow Volt car has been the only Aston to have attended all the previous rounds in the Series so far and presently lay fourth in the GS Championship table after the nine rounds so far. With 350 points still on the table for this weekend’s winner, that is still enough for the #7 crew to overcome their 280 point gap to the leading BMW crew ahead of them but reality will probably require them to rely heavily upon a range of misfortune and low points scores for the three crews ahead of them.

The #23 Notlad crew meanwhile do not have that problem as they only stepped over to the IMSA sanctioned series after a couple of hefty accidents for their paymaster and amateur driver Matt Dalton in the SRO GT America Series earlier this year sidelined him from continuing in those series but was gracious enough to support his long time co-driver and mentor Gallagher as well as the talented but sadly underfunded Scotsman.


Having dipped their proverbial toe into the Michelin Pilot Challenge at the four-hour season opener at Daytona way back in January, the team then returned to the series for the first race at Watkins Glen mid-season. Despite also having skipped the Laguna Seca round a couple of months ago, Gallagher and McAleer have still accrued enough points to lay in P23 with about half the number of points as the #7 crew which is pretty impressive in its own right.


This final race of the year around the iconic 2.5-mile circuit will again be in its customary two-hour format with twenty-two GS and eighteen TCR cars on the provisional entry list. Tomorrow (Wednesday) sees the series hot the track for the first time for Free Practice with Qualifying then on Thursday ready for a Friday race starting at 13:10hrs local.

Photo credits – MPC / Teams / CSJ Motorsport / F Lagunas
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