DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — As his co-driver deftly throttled his way out of the gravel late in the race, Ben Keating had just one thought:
“Go-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!”
The championship in the Le Mans Prototype 2 (LMP2) class boiled down to that moment in the final minutes of Motul Petit Le Mans: Alex Quinn trying not to give it too much gas, keeping the No. 52 PR1 Mathiasen Motorsports ORECA LMP2 07 moving through the gravel trap in Turn 10 and pointed back toward a third-place finish and the class championship for Keating and Paul-Loup Chatin.
“He was able to plow through it,” Keating said. “That was the key to our championship.”
The finish left Keating, Chatin, Quinn and the rest of the PR1 Mathiasen Motorsports team celebrating a hard-fought season championship. For Chatin, the 32-year-old veteran, it capped a remarkable rookie season in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
“It’s been an amazing year,” Chatin said. “It’s my first year in IMSA, and we won the championship. It was a difficult year at times, but we stayed together in a unique way.”
The path to the championship wasn’t always straightforward. Keating and Chatin came into the final weekend trailing Mikkel Jensen and Steven Thomas in the No. 11 TDS Racing ORECA by just 20 points. Keating opened a 16-second lead early in the race, spun but stayed in front.
As the end of the 10-hour race neared with the No. 11 car out of contention, Keating and Chatin needed only to maintain their place to win the championship. That’s when Quinn, after making contact with the race-leading LMP2 of Era Motorsport, rolled into the Turn 10B trap and deftly showed his escape skills by slowly spinning the wheels through the gravel and keeping the No. 52 moving forward until making it back onto the racing surface.
“I just had to manage it,” Quinn said of those agonizing seconds when he feared the car would become stuck in the gravel. “I didn’t want to be there in the first place, so I was a bit disappointed. But we got back on track and did what we needed to do.”
Like the season-ending race, the road to the championship had its share of unexpected twists and turns. It began with a one-off victory in the Rolex 24 At Daytona by Fred Poordad, Francesco Pizzi, James Allen and Gianmaria Bruni in the No. 55 Proton Competition ORECA, a race that didn’t award season points for LMP2.
From there, the points race settled into a battle among the No. 52, the No. 11 and the No. 04 Crowdstrike Racing by APR ORECA co-driven by George Kurtz and Ben Hanley. A win at the TireRack.com Battle on the Bricks at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in September gave Thomas and Jensen their slim lead heading to the finale at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta.
In the end, third place in the race was all that was needed for PR1 Mathiasen Motorsports to claim the title by 37 points over the No. 04 and by 53 points over the No. 11.
“This one is special for a lot of different reasons,” said Keating, who claimed the LMP2 championship for the second time in three years. “It’s just been an incredible run. It’s such a great team.”
Kurtz won the Jim Trueman Bronze Cup for the highest-finishing Bronze-rated driver in LMP2, accepting the invitation to the 24 Hours of Le Mans next year. Kurtz will return to Le Mans in 2024 as the defending LMP2 ProAm champion after winning the class this year with Allen and Colin Braun in an Algarve entry.
Kurtz, Hanley and the No. 04 Crowdstrike ORECA also claimed the IMSA Michelin Endurance Cup, which goes to the best performers in each class at the four longer races on the WeatherTech Championship schedule.
“That was really the prize for us,” Kurtz said. “We would’ve had to have a lot go right to win the (season) championship, but the two things we were focused on were the endurance championship and Le Mans.”