If the two Porsche Penske Motorsports 963s had any good cards to play, they were holding them very close to the vest on Friday at Road America. The No. 6 and No.7 hadn’t really shown much pace in the two practice sessions, and in one of them, they were both bested by Tijmen van der Helm in the privateer JDC-Miller Motorsports 963.
Then qualifying rolled around on Saturday, and Matt Campbell was spoiling what was expected to be an all-Cadillac party on the front row. It wasn’t quite a zero-to-hero moment for the No. 7 squad, but it was a major step forward with Campbell pulling out a lap like nothing the team had produced all weekend.
“We tested here a couple of months ago, but since then the track evolution has been absolutely huge,” Campbell explained after he and Felipe Nasr drove from their inherited pole to victory over Tom Blomqvist and Colin Braun in the No 60 Meyer Shank Racing Acura ARX-06. “So we came here in practice and we were really struggling in all areas; not only on car balance, but also some stuff on software and so forth.
“So we made some big swings overnight. We really dug through it and found some issues and, obviously, going into qualifying, it was a big unknown what we’re going to have as a package. But luckily it’s gone our way and then we were just able to fine-tune the car going into race. Hats off to the team. They were really able to turn it around for us. We were digging through a lot during Friday night trying to figure it out, and luckily it’s paid off.”
Clearly Campbell liked what he had, because he put in a late-session flyer that was 0.068s off Derani’s pole time. The fact that they could arrive at a track this far into the season, especially when they had tested there previously, and be relatively out in the weeds speaks to both the newness and the complexity of the GTP cars, as Nasr pointed out.
“I think these cars, there are a lot of combinations of factors to put everything together, especially on the software side with all the hybrid components,” he said.
“We struggled here in free practice, and we just went through all the data and one area that we clearly could see is we struggled with braking. Then we made that better the next day and almost put it on pole. So you just can see how many details there are all around to put together. Also, having the tire in the window was another thing. The tire seems quite sensitive to the track temp as well. There was quite a shift from day one to qualifying day, and in the race the car felt great.”
Indeed, it was a relatively dominant performance from the front on Sunday. Campbell, crediting some lucky breaks in traffic, pulled out a comfortable lead early on. With the race going green from 20 minutes in until the checker, that gap was maintained throughout the race until Blomqvist, with four fresh tires on the Acura compared to the No. 7 only taking left-side tires in the final stop, made a hard charge to close within two seconds in the closing laps. And with the victory for the No. 7 squad there have been six different GTP winners in seven races this season.