Garcia: IMSA at the “High End” of Contact-Heavy Racing

Antonio Garcia believes the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship is currently at the “high end” of contact racing in the GT-based categories, following several recent highly-fought races for GTD Pro and GTD class honors.

The Corvette Racing by Pratt Miller Motorsports driver, who along with co-driver Alexander Sims currently sit fourth in the GTD Pro standings, have been the victim of contact this season, most notably last time out at Road America when Sims’ No. 3 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R was hit by Mike Rockenfeller’s Ford Mustang GT3 on the opening lap.

While Rockenfeller was handed a drive-through penalty for incident responsibility, the latter stages of the Road America race saw numerous scrapes and tangles between competitors in the two GT3 categories, in what some described as bumper-car racing.

When asked if the series is getting to the point of having too much contact, Garcia replied: “Probably, yes.”

“I never like contact too much,” he said. “I don’t really like ABS and at times that brings in times where everybody dives in and just prays for the car to stop.

“There’s a lot of big moves and at times you just rely on your systems, and at times the system doesn’t quite work as well as you think.

“That’s probably one of the things. The cars are going faster and faster, and the braking zones are getting also way shorter, so the whole thing is kind of going in the wrong direction from that perspective.”

Garcia reflected further on the Road America first-lap incident: “We were unlucky. I felt we didn’t deserve what happened at the last race where we got hit on the very first lap and obviously the car wasn’t quite what it needed to be after that.

“But for sure that always happens at the end of the year, also.

“Everyone wants to get a good result and at times decisions are not as good as they are at the beginning of the season.

“I believe we are on the high end of where I would like racing to be.

“But let’s see how it goes in the last three races. We’ve always seen that Petit Le Mans is always crazy. And if we are at this level now, I don’t know what’s going to happen at Petit.”

Turner Motorsport driver Robby Foley echoed Garcia’s sentiments on the current state of driving standards in the series.

“There’s multiple factors causing the contact and things like that,” he said.

“Speaking of Road America specifically, I was lucky in a sense to, in the strategy we were on and just the track position we had, I avoided pretty much all of that, which really helped our race.

“Watching back the highlights, I was really glad to have not been in the middle of the GT pack at the time.

“As Antonio said, with ABS and things like that, there’s more desperation than I’ve ever seen.

“I’m still young and new to this style of racing in a way; I’ve never really raced without ABS in these type of cars.

“I would call the level of desperation fairly high. Track position is super important and it’s difficult to pass.

“But I’ve been in many situations where instead of someone setting up a pass over a series of laps to create an opportunity, they just go and do this crazy big dive and then you see contact and an accordion effect backwards.

“For me it’s a little bit over the top. I think everyone would actually agree with that.

“There’s always this drama that happens between multi class as well.

“But speaking just in GTD, I think we’re reaching a point where there’s quite a lot of contact and I’m not exactly sure the solution to fix it.

“But in some ways it’s healthy because there’s many cars; there’s over 20 cars each race, all with the same BoP, all trying to race for the same space on track.

“It’s very exciting to watch, but from a sporting perspective, it’s right on the limit, I would say.”

John Dagys

John Dagys is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sportscar365. Dagys spent eight years as a motorsports correspondent for FOXSports.com and SPEED Channel and has contributed to numerous other motorsports publications worldwide. Contact John