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If you call a race The Chevrolet Sports Car Classic Presented by the Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers, you would logically hope that a Chevrolet wins if you are a pro-business motorsports fan, and that’s what happened Saturday – the top two Prototype cars were Chevrolet Corvette Daytona Prototypes, the top GT Daytona car was a built-in-Detroit Dodge Viper GT3, and overall places three through six were Prototype Challenge cars, which are all powered by Chevrolet V8 engines.
Winning overall was the No. 10 Konica Minolta Wayne Taylor Racing entry driven by brothers Ricky and Jordan Taylor. The team finished a comfortable 1.740 seconds ahead of the polesitting No. 5 Action Express Mustang Sampling Corvette DP of Christian Fittipaldi and Joao Barbosa.
Jordan Taylor said that the key to the win was a restart after a caution flag, where he and Barbosa both had to start behind slower cars. At the green flag Barbosa went to the right, but so did two of the slower cars.
“They blocked him, and I was able to slide around the outside,” Jordan said. After that, it was just a matter of defending his position. The Taylor brothers like street courses – their only other win this year was the other street course race, at Long Beach.
In GT Daytona, the No. 33 ViperExchange.com/Gas Monkey Garage Dodge Viper GT3-R couldn’t have picked a better race for the team’s first win of the season. The Viper, said driver and team owner Ben Keating, is the only U.S. car in the class, “and it’s really a big deal for us to win in Detroit.” Keating is the world’s largest Viper dealer. “Win on Saturday, sell on Monday, I hope,” he said.
Keating said that drivers from all three GT Daytona cars that finished on the podium would be flying to Le Mans for testing the afternoon of the IMSA race here, arriving in Le Mans and 6 a.m. Other drivers, such as the Taylor Brothers, would be heading over on a commercial flight, arriving a little later.
Next up in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship: Sahlen’s Six Hours at the Glen, a six-hour endurance race at the newly repaved Watkins Glen International circuit. It’s scheduled for June 30-July 3.
