Whelen Engineering Cadillac Outperforms 12 Hours Of Sebring Field

By Joe Jennings

SEBRING, Fla. – The Whelen Engineering Racing Cadillac DPi outperformed a stellar field of contenders to win the 67th Annual Twelve Hours of Sebring Presented by Advance Auto Parts. Driving the red prototype were Felipe Nasr, Eric Curran and Pipo Derani. The trio combined their talents to lead 240 of the 348 laps run.

At the outset, the race seemed like a continuation of the Rolex 24 at Daytona as rain fell throughout Friday night and into Saturday morning drenching the track and the grounds. As a result, the opening 40 minutes of the event were run under the yellow flag. At that point, the green flag came out and the 38-car field took off with tires throwing water in the air further diminishing visibility.

Eventually, the rain diminished and the on-track action intensified to the delight of the huge crowd of spectators on hand.

While the Whelen trio built up commanding leads, that lead diminished with a yellow flag bunching the field in the final minutes of the long race. Nasr stood his ground and managed to hold off the hard-charging Jordan Taylor aboard the Rolex 24 winning Wayne Taylor Racing Cadillac DPi. The margin of victory was a narrow 1.8 seconds.

Third place went to the Whelen team car – the Mustang Sampling Racing Cadillac DPi of Joao Barbosa, Filipe Albuquerque and Brendon Hartley.

Fourth place went to one of the Team Penske Acura DPi’s of Alexander Rossi, Helio Castroneves and Ricky Taylor.

The LMP2 class victory went to the Performance Tech Motorsports ORECA LMP2 of Kyle Masson and Cameron Cassels.

Porsche once again showed its command of the Sebring track by copping the GTLM class with the Porsche GT Team Porsche 911 RSR. Nick Tandy, Patrick Pilet and Frederic Makowiecki.

For Porsche, it chalked up its 96th career victory on the challenging road course.

One of two Ford Chip Ganassi Racing Ford G’s took second in the hands of Joey Hand, Dirk Mueller and IndyCar ace Sebastien Bourdais.

Third went to the Chevrolet Corvette Racing C7.R of Jan Magnussen, Antonio Garcia and Mike Rockenfeller.

For the second consecutive time in 2019, the GTD victor was the Lamborghini Huracan GT3 driven by Rolf Ineichen, Mirko Bortolotti and Rik Breukers.

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