BMW’s victory in the Sahlen’s Six Hours of The Glen has been cemented following the denial of Porsche Penske Motorsport’s appeal of its post-race penalty. IMSA certified the results on Thursday morning, allowing BMW M Team RLL and drivers Connor De Phillippi and Nick Yelloly to officially celebrate their first victory in IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship competition.
The No. 6 Porsche 963 finished first on track after Mathieu Jaminet made a late-race pass of De Phillippi in the No. 25 BMW M Hybrid V8. BMW Team RLL got the No. 25 to the front with solid strategy, but Jaminet got the better of the traffic and caught and passed De Phillippi with only minutes to go. However, in post-race technical inspection, the skid plate of the No. 6 963 was found to be thinner than the specified minimum, and the car was moved to last place in GTP. Porsche Penske Motorsport protested the ruling.
According to IMSA, after receiving official notification from IMSA of the post-race technical penalty in Sunday’s race, Porsche Penske Motorsport subsequently requested a protest. IMSA supervisory officials reviewed documents provided by Porsche Penske Motorsport but did not find anything that would have overturned the penalty decision. Official race results and point standings were released this morning with the penalty upheld.
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“Obviously, we are pleased by IMSA’s technical group decision,” BMW M Team RLL principal Bobby Rahal said. “There is nothing like winning, but I was most happy with the pace of the BMW M Hybrid V8 throughout the Watkins Glen race. My thanks to everyone at BMW who have worked so diligently on both sides of the Atlantic over a very intense period of time on the new-era GTP program. Our guys were in Munich starting last July assisting with the car builds. We received the cars in September and began testing in October. Five races into the season, we are winners.”
The penalty for Porsche is significant, as it marks a 130-point swing in the point standings. Instead of leading the championship, Tandy and Jaminet are now third, behind Action Express Racing’s Pipo Derani and Alexander Sims in first and Yelloly and De Phillippi in second. It also means that all four marques participating in GTP this season have scored a victory.
“Obviously a win is a win, but we certainly didn’t want it to come under these circumstances,” said De Phillippi, who scored his sixth win in IMSA competition but first in the top prototype class. “We would have preferred to hold onto the lead for those last four minutes and I would like to have celebrated with my teammates. But that’s racing. Everybody with BMW M Team RLL did a phenomenal job throughout the race overcoming the issues we had early on with some unlucky contact, so to bounce back with strategy and speed was an incredible feat.
“Maybe we didn’t pick up the win how we would have liked, but we certainly had the speed to represent a win, and I figure it was still well-deserved.”
BMW was the last manufacturer to put its LMDh car on track, and it showed in the season opener at Daytona. But at Sebring the BMWs were in the fight to the end, ending up with a second-place finish when the top three cars went out in a late-race crash. In the third race of the season at Long Beach, it seemed pretty clear that BMW had caught up.
“I think we’ve kind of taken everybody by surprise because we were the last to the party, but we’ve been swinging above our weight class the entire year, especially from Sebring onwards,” De Phillippi added. “That’s something we’re all proud of, but we want to be dominant and we’re not going to stop pushing until we get where we want to be.”