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Third Straight Win In WeatherTech Championship For Mazda

[Tyler Jensen Photo]

[Tyler Jensen Photo]

Harry Tincknell held off a hard-charging Dane Cameron to take the victory in the IMSA Road Race Showcase at Road America.

Tincknell, driving the #55 Mazda RT-24P took the checkers just .227 seconds ahead of Cameron in the Team Penske Acura Dpi, capturing the third series win in a row for Mazda Team Joest. The victory is the second in the Weathertech Championship season for Tincknell and co-driver Jonathan Bomarito.

Cameron had put the Acura on the pole and had led all practices leading up to the race. On Sunday morning it looked like the weekend would belong to Team Penske, even the Mazda drivers thought the same.

“All weekend we had been there, or thereabouts, but never the ultimate pace. I think we saw that a little bit in qualifying. Honestly going into the race today I thought P3 would be a really a strong result, but it was very clear very early on the Penskes weren’t pulling away,” said Tincknell.

Tincknell led the final 32 laps of the race, but it wasn’t easy as Cameron stayed in the leader’s mirror in the final laps.

“I think I had 2 or three laps in the carousel where I caught the GT car in the wrong point and you lose 2 seconds minimum. The gap went from 5 seconds to almost on me,” explained Tincknell. “I had really poor traffic in the last two or three laps. He gained on me a lot. My feeling on my last lap was I had to attack as much as I could. It was a big lunge on the GTD car. I ran wide, I knew I was going too, but I knew I had to get a car between us. So when I got back on the track I was pretty aggressive in defending but was able to get it closed off before he was able to get along side. I wasn’t worried about anything from race control. It’s very hard to make a pass in this championship, everyone is going to fight to the death. In the end, everyone got through ok. Everyone made it to the podium.”
The race never saw a yellow caution flag wave. Running under green the entire race allowed the Mazda team to set a new record for number of laps run in the 2 hour and 40 minute timed race – 83 laps. The previous record was set in 2015 at 76 laps.

Matt McMurray and Patrick Kelly captured the LMP2 class victory in the PR1-Mathiasen Motorsports ORECA.

Richard Westbrook and Ryan Briscoe won GTLM in the Ford GT with Ford Ganassi Racing while the The GTD class was won by Matt Campbell and Zacharie Robichon in the Porsche 911 GT3 R for Pfaff Motorsports.

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