INDIANAPOLIS – When it comes to the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship’s annual visit to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, it doesn’t seem to matter much whether the TireRack.com Battle on the Bricks is a six-hour enduro or a two-hour and 40-minute sprint: the result is the same, at least in terms of the “action per hour” quotient and tight finishes.
Sunday’s sprint race was action-packed from a chaotic first turn to four nail-biting finishes in an event featuring all four WeatherTech Championship classes.
It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over (1)
The race could hardly have gotten off to a worse start for Russell Ward and the No. 57 Winward Racing Mercedes-AMG GT3. On a weekend when the GTD grid was based on championship points after inclement weather abandoned qualifying, the championship-leading car was moved to the rear of the grid following a pre-grid infraction.
Unhappy but undaunted, Ward promptly carved his way through the GTD field to run in the top five before handing over the reins to co-driver Philip Ellis.
Robby Foley admitted he wasn’t surprised when he checked the rear-view mirror of his leading No. 96 Turner Motorsport BMW M4 GT3 EVO and saw Ellis filling it, giving Foley a serious run for the win before falling half a second short.
In a way, Sunday’s race appeared a microcosm of Winward’s 2026 WeatherTech Championship season in pursuit of a third straight title.
The roller-coaster ride has featured four wins but several other bad luck moments before bouncing back to lead the points leaving Virginia International Raceway last month.
Ellis and Ward only lead Foley and Patrick Gallagher by six points leaving Indianapolis, but the Brickyard comeback ensures they’re still in the driver’s seat of the respective GTD championship battles heading to Motul Petit Le Mans and Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta in a week and a half.
It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over (2)
4.42 seconds: That’s the combined margins of victory for the GTP, GTD PRO and GTD classes. Suffice to say the results in all three categories were very much in doubt until the finish.
And while the LMP2-winning No. 18 Era Motorsport ORECA finished more than 15 seconds clear of the similar No. 52 Bryan Herta Autosport with PR1/Mathiasen entry, that result was in serious question given that Era’s Christian Rasmussen was running on fumes in the final laps with no guarantees the Era ORECA would have enough fuel to make the finish.
“We knew it was going to be tight but we just committed to the fuel save super early,” Rasmussen said. “(My engineer) kept giving me a fuel target and then the next lap he would say ‘We need more fuel save than that.’ Next lap, ‘We need more fuel save than that.’ But we got it done.”
Fuel giveth and fuel taketh away. While one moonlighting IndyCar driver, Rasmussen, won, one aspiring one in newly crowned Indy NXT champion and IMSA rookie Nikita Johnson came up snake-eyes in his No. 59 McLaren 720S GT3 EVO he drives for RLL Team McLaren.
Johnson’s demise opened the door for a classic Ford vs. Chevrolet battle to the finish, where this time the No. 64 Mustang GT3 prevailed over the No. 4 Corvette Z06 GT3.R. Dennis Olsen, who beat Nicky Catsburg, hailed the Dutchman’s clean efforts late in the going.
“I have a lot of respect for Nicky,” Olsen said. “Honestly, I felt sorry for shoving him wide, but at the same time I had this prototype to my inside so (I) didn’t know what to do. I tried to stay in the middle as good as I could but . . . we got the win.”
As did Sheldon van der Linde, Dries Vanthoor and BMW M Team WRT, thanks to the former’s late race heroics. After a caution and restart in the final 15 minutes, van der Linde made a number of overtaking moves before finally forcing the No. 24 BMW M Hybrid V8 past the No. 31 Cadillac Whelen Cadillac V-Series.R of Earl Bamber who, together with Jack Aitken, were working to position Aitken, the Cadillac Whelen team and Cadillac closer to wrapping their crowns… which they can do officially in Braselton, Ga.
“Sheldon did a really good move into Turn 12,” Bamber said, “and I also had to remember we were in the championship. I think if it was another day we might have fought a little bit harder.”
In contrast, van der Linde used the fact that he, his co-driver, team and manufacturer are out of the running for the GTP championships to his advantage.
“I was willing to risk everything for the win today,” van der Linde admitted. “I had that in the back of my mind going into the race already. That was our advantage that we could play elbows out and they couldn’t. So I used that to our advantage, and it worked out perfectly with the move into Turn 12.”
It’s Not Over ’til It’s Over (3)
57 points. That’s the total number of points separating first and second places in the LMP2, GTD PRO and GTD driver championship standings heading to the season finale at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta.
Specifically, Jeremy Clarke and Tom Dillmann lead George Kurtz and Alex Quinn by 4 points in LMP2, Ward and Ellis lead Foley and Gallagher by 6 points in GTD, while Catsburg and Tommy Milner lead Connor De Phillippi and Neil Verhagen by 47 markers in GTD Pro.
Aitken enjoys a 147-point cushion to Laurin Heinrich in GTP, which isn’t insurmountable, but highly improbable to lose. There’s a maximum delta of 165 points between the maximum 385 and minimum 220 points available in Atlanta across qualifying and the race for an anticipated 11-car GTP field, so it’d take a Herculean Heinrich effort to overtake him.
But Aitken is not about to put the champagne on ice just yet. After all, some legendary drivers have crashed on the pace laps at Motul Petit Le Mans (can you say Allan McNish?) while mechanical failures on the pace laps have denied championships to some teams (can you say JDC-Miller? OK, it was the Michelin Pilot Challenge race, but it cost JDC-Miller a likely class championship).
“I think if we out-qualify them by a certain number of places that will be good enough if we just start (the race),” said Aiken. “But if that doesn’t happen, we go into the race with (the championship) still open and anything can happen. Especially at Petit. So, we are definitely not going to count our chickens.”
Not unlike van der Linde on Sunday, Heinrich’s got nothing to lose in a fortnight. After finishing third in Indianapolis in the No. 6 car with Kevin Estre, a race after finishing second in the No. 5 JDC-Miller MotorSports Porsche 963 at Road America with Tijmen van der Helm and Kaylen Frederick, could first be in the cards when he returns to the No. 7 Porsche Penske Motorsport Porsche 963 with Felipe Nasr and Julien Andlauer for the first time since finishing first at both Daytona and Sebring earlier this year?
“Let’s see what we have in Petit,” he says. “We’ve been strong in endurance races. That makes me confident. I’ll try to up my game as much as I can in the two weeks that I have to prepare. I’ll arrive with best version of myself and just give it everything, put on a good show for the fans and hopefully bring Porsche out on top.”
