The Petit Le Mans: More proof we’re in a golden age for sportscar racing

BRASELTON, Ga.—The Petit Le Mans is a 10-hour endurance race held each fall at Road Atlanta in Georgia. As the name suggests, it's run with similar rules as the French race that runs for 24 hours each June, which means a mix of prototype and production-based sports cars take to the track at the same time. And although Petit Le Mans was first held just 21 years ago, it quickly established itself alongside events with decades-more history. In fact, it helped revitalize endurance racing, particularly in the US where it gave rise to the series we now know as the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.

This year's Petit Le Mans was possibly the best in a decade. In each of the three classes (Prototype, GTLM, and GTD), there were championships to decide. On top of that, the North American Endurance Cup was up for grabs (it's a separate trophy, again for all three classes, scored just at the longer races of the year). And those out of title contention were just going for the win.

Qualifying is a bit meaningless with such a long race to run, but the field was led to the green flag by Pipo Derani in #22, one of the two black-and-green Nissan DPis. Derani's car was very fast at the start of the race but ran into trouble less than half an hour in with a puncture. The two Mazdas were similarly strong; the team was fresh off a very good race at Laguna Seca that should have ended in its first win, and both Oliver Jarvis (#77) and Jonathan Bomarito (#55) set some blisteringly fast laps.

For a while the prototype race was between the Mazdas and the Penske Acuras, but each ran into problems. The #55 Mazda went from the lead to a lap down after contact with another car. Juan Pablo Montoya had something fail in the #6 Acura as he went through turn 3; the contact with the tire barrier was fixable but only after three hours in the pits. Luckily things were a little less dramatic for their sister cars, both of whom held the lead at multiple times during the race.

The Cadillac DPi-V.R is the new Porsche 956

Trouble for the three Japanese manufacturers meant advantage for Cadillac. Of the four manufacturers to commit to the DPi category, Cadillac has embraced it the most heartily. None of the other manufacturers are yet ready to sell cars to customer teams, but next year another two more Cadillac DPi-V.R.s will join the series, making a total of seven. The fact that Cadillac Racing is so eager to support customer teams bodes well for the future. Factory teams will come and go, but a sports car series like IMSA lives and dies by its privateers. And a series will attract many more of those if they know there's a chance they might win. It's partly why Group C and GTP were so great during the 1980s: customer teams could buy potentially race-winning machinery. A private team could go to Porsche, buy a 956 or 962, and, assuming everyone on the team did their jobs better than everyone on all the other teams, come home with a trophy.

Up until now, that role had been filled by the LMP2 prototypes, upon which the DPi cars are based. In fact, this year saw some strong performances by teams running LMP2 cars, as IMSA has used "performance balancing" to achieve some parity between the two kinds of prototypes. Core Autosport demonstrated just how competitive an LMP2 car could be this year, and its #54 Ligier went into Petit as a championship contender hot off two wins and two second-place finishes in the preceding four rounds.

The thinking behind prototype parity was to encourage some LMP2 teams from Asia or Europe to enter the odd IMSA race, and United Autosports got plenty of headlines by running Fernando Alonso in an LMP2 car at Daytona. But in truth, these one-off or occasional entries were fewer and farther between than hoped, and next year the DPi cars are being unleashed. After all, why bother letting car companies take highly standardized LMP2 cars and make them faster if you're only going to peg them back to LMP2 performance levels? From next year on, a DPi will almost certainly be needed if you want to win, so you can see why I'm cheered by the fact that the class is growing.

But I digress. Merely taking the start of the race was enough to seal the 2018 manufacturer's championship for Cadillac, and it notched up another honor after the fourth hour of the race. The NAEC awards points at various stages in each of the four races that count, and the #31 Whelan Engineering Cadillac was in first place at that point, giving it an unassailable lead in the points. Really, though, it could have been anyone's race. With 15 minutes to go, there were still nine prototypes on the lead lap.

Some were playing the fuel mileage game. With nine minutes to go, the championship-contending #54 was forced to stop for fuel, going from fourth to seventh in the process. With three minutes left on the clock, it was the #22 Nissan's turn, swapping third for sixth. Then, on the final lap, the #85 Oreca LMP2 of JDC-Miller Motorsport sputtered to a halt, handing eighth place—and the 2018 team's prototype championship—to the Whelan Engineering Cadillac.

More drama was still to come. After spending the final 25 minutes leading the race, on the run into turn 10 the #5 Mustang Sampling Racing Cadillac was literally coasting on fumes. This promoted yet another Cadillac (the #10 of Wayne Taylor Racing) to the top, its first win all year. The Mazdas filled out the podium with second (#77) and third (#55), which after the season it's had surely felt almost as good as a win.

Can you bite your nails for ten hours straight?

Things were just as exciting in the GT classes. In the GTLM class, performance balancing had kept the competition very even throughout the year. Six of the eight full-season entries won races; only the #3 Corvette C7.R and the #24 BMW M8 GTE had failed to reach the top step. Weirder still? The #3 was actually leading the points table. Not bad for a racecar that's now quite long in the tooth compared to its rivals. Its main competition was the #67 Ford GT. Ford had the manufacturer's championship in the bag and was also going for the GTLM NAEC win with the #66 car.

Porsche probably had the most buzz before the race, no doubt thanks to the very cool retro liveries on the #911 and #912. After digging into the archives to recreate the Pink Pig and the Rothmans paint schemes for Le Mans, this time it was the 1998 GT1 that lent its look to the race cars. It's quite appropriate, considering that the 911 GT1 and the current 911 RSR are the only two 911 variants to mount the engine ahead of the rear axle.

Just like Le Mans, the heritage look worked. In the #911, Nick Tandy managed his fuel mileage better than anyone else to win the class by almost 12 seconds. The championship fight between the #3 Corvette and #67 Ford was much less straightforward and, thus, utterly gripping. (In a strange twist of fate that has nothing to do with the outcome of the race, the lead engineers for the #3 Corvette and #67 Ford are father and son.)

With about two and a half hours left on the clock, it looked like Corvette had everything in the bag. Then, inexplicably, Antonio Garcia spun the car off the track and into the wall just as he was leaving the pits during a safety car period. The front of the car was stoved in, and after limping back around to pit entry it was taken straight into the garage for repairs.

It was a bizarre and unfortunate misstep for Garcia, one somewhat reminiscent of another classic Petit Le Mans. Back in 2008, Allan McNish did something similar, only he did it on the warm-up lap just before the start. It took two laps to fix that damage, laps which McNish clawed back over the following hours before going on to win in one of the finest drives I've ever seen. Unlike McNish, Garcia didn't have ten hours to recover, and he rejoined the race three (not two) laps down—but all was not lost. The Ford needed to come in first or second, which seemed possible very late in the race. It ultimately slipped back to fifth. Meanwhile, the Corvette made it up into eighth place by the end, enough to take the team championship by six points.

The win in the final class, GTD, would go to the #63 WeatherTech-sponsored Scuderia Corsa Ferrari 488 GT3. Second went to the #86 Acura Meyer Shank Racing NSX GT3, which was unfortunate as it paid too few points to allow Katherine Legge to win the class championship. The series win went to the third place in the race, the #48 Paul Miller Racing Lamborghini Huracan GT3.

Listing image by Brian Cleary/Getty Images