Wayne Taylor Racing’s Filipe Albuquerque and Ricky Taylor were able to hold off a charging Oliver Jarvis in the later stages of the race to win the IMSA Fastlane SportsCar Weekend event at Road America Sunday (Aug. 7) in changeable weather. It is Albuquerque and Taylor’s fourth victory of the year.
“I needed to re-invent myself,” Albuquerque told NBC Sports’ Matt Yocum in victory lane. “I knew that [turn 7] was tricky when [Jarvis] got in there. I said, ‘this is me, [I’m] coming,’ and went to his left. It was a big moment over there.”
Unlike the rest of the week, the race went green Sunday morning under threatening skies. Albuquerque led from the pole and opened up a couple of seconds on the pack in the opening laps.
While the heavy rains that had marred the preliminary Porsche Carrera Cup North America race early in the morning were gone, the opening laps did see some mist falling. The weather forecast for the race did result in IMSA making a late change to minimum drive-time rules, cutting it to 30 minutes. This was more or less designed to prevent the issues from Watkins Glen that resulted in nine teams being given post-race penalties.
The caution came out early on when PR1 Mathiasen Motorsports’ Steven Thomas spun in turn 8 after contact from High Class Racing’s Dennis Andersen. No harm, no foul at first. Then, he tried to turn around. He tried to spin his ORECA 07-Gibson around on the wet grass and managed to get his rear wheels stuck in the gravel trap, requiring assistance. The 30-minute mark was reached by the time the pit lane opened, so nearly the entire field pitted under the yellow.
At this point, the rain started to pick up, but not before a number of teams had put fresh slick tires on. As a result, things got rather slippery.
Action Express Racing’s Pipo Derani spun out in turn 14 after his car twitched under braking. Others had to tip toe around. JDC-Miller MotorSports’ Richard Westbrook took rain tires during the caution, which turned out to be a good move.
The heavier rain lead to the rest of the DPi teams heading to the pits for wets. Jarvis was the first to do so. Everyone else follows. The result of this was that Westbrook ended up with a lead of nearly two minutes in class.
That massive advantage was usurped by a caution due to debris. That, along with a drying track surface, brought everyone to the pits for another round of stops. Tristan Vautier continued to…
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