BRASELTON, Ga.—John Pew, Oswaldo Negri, and Olivier Pla, drivers of the #60 Michael Shank Racing Honda HPD Ligier JS P2, won the 2016 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship Petit Le Mans endurance race, completing 403 laps of the 2.56-mile Road Atlanta racetrack 24 seconds faster than the Extreme Speed Motorsport team of Scott Sharp, Luis Felipe Derani, and Johannes van Overbeek in their similar Ligier-Honda, over ten hours of racing.
The Extreme Speed team was the pre-race favorite, having won the two other extreme endurance races of the season, the Twelve Hours of Sebring and the Rolex 24 at Daytona. ESM came on strong in the later laps of the race but couldn’t close the gap to the speeding Shank car.
Mazda Motorsports nearly made the podium a an LMP2 sweep, but the #70 Mazda Prototype burst into flame halfway through a lap with 14 minutes left in the race, handing third place to the #10 Wayne Taylor Racing Dallara-Corvette. The Mazda ended up being scored in seventh.
The win secured for Shank Racing the North American Endurance Cup, awarded for the best performances throughout the series’ four longest races, a total of 52 hours of racing. Because the #60 Shank Ligier led most of Petit Le Mans, the team earned enough points to pass both top contenders, ESM and #5 Action Express Racing Coyote-Corvette. The #5 Action Express car finished fifth in the race.
Most of the race was a three-way battle between MSR and the two Action Express cars, the #5, driven by Joao Barbosa, Christian Fittipaldi, and Filipe Albuquerque, and the #31 driven by Eric Curran, Dane Cameron, and Simon Pagenaud. These two Action Express teams were contesting the series championship, with the #5 squad coming into the event with a one-point lead. The #31 finished fourth, one place ahead of its team mates and rivals, winning the class championship.
