When the 10-hour Petit Le Mans concluded Oct. 10 of last year, Flowery Branch resident Johnny O’Connell and his Corvette teammates stood atop the podium at Road Atlanta in Braselton having won their GT1 class by six laps.

That win served as the icing on a cake that had been baking since O’Connell produced Corvette Racing’s first overall victory at the 24 Hours of Daytona and its first Le Mans class victory in 2001.

A year later, O’Connell is hoping to cap a season in which his team won its eighth 12 Hours at Sebring and its fourth 24 Hours at Le Mans with a second-straight victory on his hometown track.

“This year has gone very well,” O’Connell said. “We started off with a win at Sebring, and then we also had a win at Le Mans, which are really our two biggest races of the year.

“Then we switched categories (from GT1 to GT2).”

O’Connell’s reason for switching from a category in which he’d had so much success in the Grand Touring Series is simple: He’d outgrown the competition.

That fact is evidenced by O’Connell’s resume, which since 2001 includes helping the General Motors team capture five straight manufacturers’ titles and sharing the GTS championship with teammate Ron Fellows in 2003-04.

He’s also a three-time American Le Mans Series GT1 champion, has 36 career ALMS wins, a record eight Sebring 12-hour class victories and holds ALMS records for most starts (95), most podium finishes (74), most top-five finishes (87) and most top-10 finishes (93).

And as if that isn’t enough, O’Connell is the first American driver to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans four times.

“Our team had become so strong that we scared the competition off,” O’Connell said. “So by changing to a different category, we got into an area where we were really competing against the Corvette’s competition which is Porshe, BMW and Ferrari.”

The move paid off immediately as O’Connell’s team finished second in its first race in the GT2 category, third in its second race and finished first in just its third race.

“We’re pretty excited about how the program is going,” O’Connell said.

Now the program will face the challenge of the Petit Le Mans at the end of what O’Connell considers one of the hardest weeks of the year.

“It’s hard because it’s home,” O’Connell said. “I run a charity auction event the week of the race which the majority of the proceeds benefit a local senior citizens day care center called The Guest House. And so between organizing that and running the race, it’s a challenging week.

“But it is also an awesome week because I love the race track and what a huge benefit it is to my community,” he added.

O’Connell’s charity auction has been a part of the week leading up to the Petit Le Mans for the past eight years, and has raised approximately $180,000 for the Guest House.

Included among this year’s auction items are Bottles of Patron signed by drivers, a set of Michelin tires, racing art and a half day of karting with O’Connell and his son Canaan.

As far as the race itself is concerned, O’Connell is both confident and unsure of his team’s chances.

“To be honest, it’s a big question mark because we have done very little running with this car,” O’Connell said. “In sports car racing we’re arguably one of the best teams in the world and our record kind of shows it. So we’ve got the people, the personnel and the equipment to get the job done, it’s just learning how to adapt to not only the changing weather conditions around here, but also the speed difference in the all the different categories of cars running.”

O’Connell points to his sheer hatred for losing and his love for competition when it comes to the question of what keeps him motivated despite an enormous amount of prior success.

That drive, he hopes, will carry him to yet another Road Atlanta win, one that he thinks could be one of the most significant of his career.

“(Winning this year’s Petit Le Mans) would mean a lot because very rarely does a team win the three big ones in one season,” O’Connel said. “That would be a very nice statement and it would be extremely significant in that in order to win, we’ve got to be perfect, because there’s some tough competition.

“It also means there would be a big party at Johnny’s house Saturday night.”