A massive shakeup due to an ill-timed safety car period gave Conquest Racing/JMF Motorsports’ Gavin Sanders the overall lead Sunday (June 19). From there, Sanders held on to give himself and Michai Stephens their first win of the 2022 Pirelli GT4 America SprintX season at VIRginia International Raceway.
Rennsport One’s Stevan McAleer, fresh off his win from Saturday, started from the pole and looked to repeat his victory. Unfortunately, this was another raced plagued by incidents.
On the first lap, two separate crashes resulted in a long red flag being thrown. First, Hattori Motorsports’ Matt Plumb spun in the Snake and hit the inside wall. He then spun back across the track and was hit hard by NOLAsport’s Seth Thomas. Meanwhile, further back, Capstone Motorsports’ Cole Ciraulo spun and hit the barriers in an unrelated crash.
Plumb’s initial hit resulted in substantial damage to the barriers (meaning that it literally opened a sizable hole in the Armco) that resulted in the red flag being displayed for over an hour with less than five minutes completed. During the red flag period, the race was officially shortened from one hour to 40 minutes.
The green flag came back out with 34 minutes to go. McAleer continued to lead the Silver class and overall. Behind him, BSport Racing’s Kenton Koch was able to get past Premier Racing’s Adam Adelson for second overall and the Pro-Am lead.
Due to the red flag, the pit stop window was pushed back eight minutes. This ended up being critical. On the first lap that the pit window was open, The Racers Group’s Derek DeBoer stopped on-track at the pit entry with fluids leaking out of his Porsche. The thought with a number of the teams was that SRO America would leave the car there until after the sequence was done, then put the yellow out like they did on Saturday.
That was not the case as DeBoer’s Porsche was partially blocking the pit entry and the fluids were starting to run across the track. What followed was confusion.
It appears that a number of the teams may have thought that the pit lane would be closed due to the caution, similar to what happens in NASCAR. Others dove in at the first opportunity to make their mid-race driver changes. Ultimately, this was allowed as legal, putting those who stayed out before the Acura NSX safety car picked up the field way behind.
Sanders put his No. 34 Mercedes in the…
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