This weekend at VIR, Robichon will share the No. 9 Porsche with Scott Hargrove, with whom he co-drove in the first five WeatherTech Championship races of the season. And in addition to the momentum, Robichon has some good recent history at VIR also, having won both races of last year’s Porsche GT3 Cup Challenge USA by Yokohama races and finishing second in the IMSA Prototype Challenge race there in 2018.
“I think any time you go to a track that you’ve had success at in the past, it gives you a little bit of confidence,” Robichon said. “When you talk to the drivers and when they say which tracks they like and which ones they don’t like, it’s usually pretty consistent with the tracks at which they’ve done well.
“For myself, obviously, VIR is a track that last year, I won both GT3 U.S. races and actually in LMP3, I finished second as well. It was a track that I really enjoyed racing at and had a lot of fun.”
Both Robichon and the No. 9 Pfaff team, as well as Briscoe, Westbrook and the No. 67 Ganassi team are looking for more fun this weekend at VIR. And their championship hopes need more of it.
While he leads the WeatherTech Sprint Cup standings, Robichon and the No. 9 team are 33 points behind the WeatherTech Championship GTD leaders, Hindman and Farnbacher in the No. 86. With three races to go, that’s a lot of ground to make up and Robichon acknowledges that fact.
“I think the Shank guys are a little bit far ahead, but I think second is an achievable goal for us,” said Robichon, who trails the second-place No. 96 Turner Motorsport BMW M6 GT3 duo of Bill Auberlen and Robby Foley by seven points. “It’d be nice to win the Sprint championship, but at the same time, the Pfaff team championship is more important at this time. Obviously, the two kind of go hand in hand, so hopefully we can keep those strong finishes until the end of the year.”
Briscoe and Westbrook are currently third in the GTLM standings. They’re 18 points behind the leading No. 912 Porsche GT Team 911 RSR duo of Earl Bamber and Laurens Vanthoor, but just four behind the second-place No. 911 Porsche pair of Nick Tandy and Patrick Pilet.
“We can only control what we have our hands on,” Briscoe said. “If we can just keep going out and winning – and if we can’t win, we’ll try to come second – we just need to finish as strong as we can and we’ll see how it turns out at the end. If they keep finishing on the podium, I think it’s pretty much impossible to catch them, but they might have some bad luck here and we’ll see what happens.”
Don’t think for a second, though, that the No. 67 team is giving up.
“We’re going to keep pushing,” Briscoe said. “We really want to win this championship if we can. It’s something that we didn’t think was possible at all two races ago, but after a couple of wins, it’s something that we half talk about now. We’ve moved up to P3 in the points and we’ll just keep pushing.
“I think the gap is big enough where we’re in a position to maybe take some risks on strategy, because we’re sort of just going for the wins. I don’t think fourth or third is even going to cut it for us if we’re going for the championship. We’ll be aggressive and try to get some more wins and see how it pans out.”
It’s that kind of mentality that will make this Sunday’s Michelin GT Challenge at VIR that much more exciting.