Wayne Taylor Racing’s Ricky Taylor and Filipe Albuquerque completed a weekend sweep Sunday (May 1) by leading every on-track session and winning the Hyundai Monterey Sports Car Championship at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. It is the second straight victory at Laguna Seca for WTR and Ricky Taylor’s third straight overall victory at the 2.238-mile road course.
“It was really, really tough,” Albuquerque told NBC Sports’ Parker Kligerman in victory lane. “I think traffic played a huge role. In the beginning, I felt that I had a magical car. I thought, ‘this is going to be a nice [race].’ Then, traffic was pulling me back and I always had [Tom Blomqvist] on my back. Now, I had to push.”
Once the green flag came out, Ricky Taylor more or less ran off and hid from the rest of the DPi class. He had a multiple-second lead early on, then ran up on the rear of the GT field and started putting lapped traffic between himself and Oliver Jarvis.
Meanwhile, Chip Ganassi Racing’s Sebastien Bourdais was forced to stop with electrical problems in the opening 15 minutes. Bourdais described the issue on NBC’s broadcast as his car losing all power and being dangerous to drive. After an attempt to fix it on pit road, the Ganassi crew pushed the No. 01 behind the wall, ending their day early.
An early caution brought the leaders to pit road just prior to the 40-minute mark, but Ricky Taylor won the race off pit road. From this point on, it was a duel between the two Acuras from Wayne Taylor Racing and Meyer Shank Racing with Curb-Agajanian.
Ricky Taylor’s plan was to run his second stint as long as he possibly could. However, Chip Ganassi Racing’s Alex Lynn slid off-course and nosed into the tires in turn 6, two laps after Tom Blomqvist stopped the No. 60. With his tires up to temperature, Blomqvist was able to jump Albuquerque for the overall lead. However, once Blomqvist’s time at the front was short-lived. Once…
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