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BRASELTON — The No. 12 Lola-Toyota went ahead early and didn’t budge, cruising to a three-lap overall win and Prototype 1 win in the 1,000-mile Petit Le Mans on Saturday at Road Atlanta for their first victory.
The car was driven by Neel Jani, Andrea Belicchi and Nicolas Prost.
“The team has really pulled all of their weight, the moral has been immense,” said team manager Bart Hayden. “I’m sad for the Muscle Milk guys, they got bit in a bit of traffic, it took them out of the close race we were having, but wow, what a great win. Our drivers did so well today.”
Muscle Milk Pickett Racing, Level 5 Motorsports and Rebellion Racing were the big winners Saturday at Road Atlanta.
Level 5 Motorsports grabbed the Prototype 2 win with the ARX-03b Honda of Scott Tucker, Christophe Bouchut and Luis Diaz finishing second overall and holding off the Morgan/Nissan car of David Heinemeier Hansson, Martin Plowman and Eric Lux, which finished third overall.
“We’ve been through this before with our first PC championship that it came down to the last race,” Tucker said. “We knew it would be tight, Conquest are great competitors. We knew 70 percent would be no easy task.”
The No. 55 driven by Tucker, three-time Indianapolis 500 winner Dario Franchitti and Marino Franchitti finished fourth overall.
Muscle Milk Pickett Racing won the P1 series behind the racing of Lucas Luhr, Klaus Graf and Romain Dumas, who secured the win after finishing 70 percent of the race.
“It was nice, we won a lot of races this year, we definitely deserved this championship, Graf said. “I came in second twice in the last two years. I think it has sunk in yet. It might take some time.”
The Nissan DeltaWing car was also a big success in its North America debut, finishing sixth overall behind the racing of Gunnar Jeannette and Lucas Ordonez.
The Corvette team had already locked up the GT series title prior to the season’s final race, but the battle for second came down to the wire, with the Ferrari driven by Scott Sharp, Toni Vilander and Johannes van Overbeek finishing just a minute ahead of the Corvette driven by Antonio Garcia, Jordan Taylor and Jan Magnussen.
It wasn’t just ALMS titles on the line Saturday. Team Thiriet finished fifth overall and clinched the European Le Mans Series, which was halted two races early.
The racers said they enjoyed the ambience of the race, even if it was a difficult track.
“The difficulty is you don’t really see the sides, you have to know the track,” said driver Mathias Beche. “But with this race we won the ELMS championship, so it was great.”
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