Kuno Wittmer from Montreal, Quebec and Rodrigo Sales from Sonoma, California won in the TCR (Touring Car) class in their No. 70 Compass Racing Audi RS3 LMS TCR.
Mark Pombo from Atlanta, Georgia and Jared Salinsky from Hudson, Florida won in ST (Street Tuner) class in their No. 52 MINI JCW.
“We rolled off the trailer and the car showed good pace and was competitive,” said Marcelli. “The Ford Mustang is a good car for the GT4 category. They’ve done a great job with it so we knew we had a good car. My teammate (Nate Stacy) had never raced at Sebring before so he needed to learn the track. We didn’t have a lot of track time and he had qualifying duties. We qualified the car thirteenth so we were a bit unsure of where we were going to be able to make it to in the race. We thought a top five would be a good result but I didn’t think we were going to be able to make it to the front after starting thirteenth.”
Stacy started the race and pitted under green flag conditions just before the halfway mark of the two-hour race. They refueled the car, put on new tires and Marcelli took over. Just after their pit stop there was a full course caution and all of the leaders pitted. Because they had just completed their one and only pit stop, the No. 60 car moved to the front of the field and they never gave up the lead. Marcelli lead for the final twenty laps of the fourty-seven lap race.
“It feels great,” Stacy said. “The team worked flawlessly. We had a really good strategy, I’m really glad it worked out. It was kind of a gutsy move, but it worked out in the end. With these Continental Tires, it was just crazy good at the beginning. I had a bit of a push toward the end there, but it got hot and sticky. It was great all around.”
“I took over with about 55 (minutes) to go and for me it was just about running the pace,” Wittmer went on to say. “We did not have the most competitive car during the race, not enough to chase down P1 (first place) because of the ABS failure. We wanted to play it smart, sit back, get it home, get the points and move on to round three. But unfortunately for my teammates in the 77 car (Tom Long and Britt Casey in the other Canadian prepared Compass Racing Audi RS3 LMS TCR) they ran out of fuel on the last lap. Luck was on our side. Fortunately for us we ended up winning the race (in the TCR class) which was fantastic.”
Kyle Marcelli and Nate Stacey
A sign of how deep the manufacturer’s battle is, is exemplified by the top five cars which were a Ford Mustang GT4, BMW M4 GT4, Porsche Cayman GT4 MR, Mercedes-AMG GT and an Audi R8. All race results can be found at the IMSA Continental Tire SportsCar Challenge site. The next race in the series takes pace at the Mid-Oho Sports Car Challenge May 4-6 in Lexington, Ohio.
Rodrigo Sales and Kuno Wittmer
Photographs © Copyright Gary Maavara
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