WeatherTech SportsCar Championship

Why?

Uh, he thinks we should have included all the practice and qualifying sessions for the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.

[laughs] That would have taken us to the start of Daytona next year, probably.

[laughs]

Yeah,

you know, hopefully your future employer, BMW, they are involved in sports car racing, IMSA racing and all that.

I really suggest that you should at least do the Sebring 12 hours and Daytona 24 hours.

I would

Whenever IMSA heads into Road Atlanta to wrap up the season, there's always lots of storylines.

But this year, it seems like it's cranked up to the max.

From razor-thin championship battles that are winner-takes-all, to teams saying farewell after this race.

That's narrowed down a little bit coming out of Indy to now be our three main competitors here.

You have Corvette Racing, who won the GTD Pro Championship here last year.

Paul Miller Racing has won these championships in IMSA before.

They know exactly what they're doing.

And then you have Pfaff Motorsports, really an underdog that has emerged all season long.

Let's start with the basics because if you're not deep into the IMSA or International Motorsport Association world, you might not know the name, or you might know the name, but not necessarily the story of it.

Motul Petit Le Mans is the season finale of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.

It's a 10-hour race or around roughly 1,000 miles.

Tends to be whichever comes first, but typically you'll see it being 10 hours, that is held at Road Atlanta in Braselton, Georgia.

Yeah, so he's a newly re-signed Ferrari factory driver, and I get the sense that he wants to do more racing than just... nine races next year in WEC.

So he spoke, I think, during the COTA weekend to some journalists about the idea of potentially racing in the U.S., either in the WeatherTech Championship or GT World Challenge America.

There are some clashes that would prevent doing a full season, so I would... have to think maybe a first step could be a Michelin Endurance Cup program.

AF Corsa has one car here already in that with the number 21.

Oh, I like Legends of Le Mans.

I might have to have a chat with him about that.

A couple of Endurance Cup full entries for 2027 in the WeatherTech Championship.

GetSpeed people will have heard of.

I'm just talking about the regular team standings for the PCs.

The WeatherTech Championship.

The 18 coming into this race was in last place, or in 10th place, I should say, among the cars that were... not including the cars

that are only doing the Michelin endurance.

so

GT already starting to show us who's likely not to score points this weekend, because it's very, very difficult to come back, although this is only the second shortest track that we visit, so you could argue that it might be slightly easier to get laps back here, but the problem is that we don't have that many opportunities, unlike IMSA Racing, to gain a full lap back.

There's the occasion for that to happen during the pass-around under Safety Car, The safety car that we had right at the start of the race didn't need a pass around because we hadn't started to see any lappery from the hypercars versus the LMGT3s.

Toyota ahead of the 83 Ferrari, and that is the 7 of Nick De Vries.

So what would be your ultimate driving goal today if you had all the sponsorship that you needed? Like what would be the ideal?

So next phase of the plan is to go full-time into IMSA WeatherTech.

So right now I'm in some of the support races for IMSA as well as Formula One.

And so IMSA WeatherTech is the North American series that you hear races like 24 Hours of Daytona, Petit Le Mans, six hours of the Glen.

That's those like really big endurance races that you see and hear of in North America.

So in a perfect world, if I had all the funding, we would go full time with a manufacturer in INSA WeatherTech, as well as adding on, if we're shooting for the stars, adding on the 24 hours of Nürburgring, as well as the 24 hours of Le Mans.