Keating Hails “Team Effort” for United’s First IMSA Win

Photo: Rick Dole/IMSA

Ben Keating said Sunday’s long-awaited first IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship victory for United Autosports was a “team effort” after overcoming an accident in final practice that left the No. 2 Oreca 07 Gibson heavily damaged.

The Bronze-rated Texan lost control of the LMP2 car in the closing stages of Saturday morning practice, slamming into the wall at the Carousel and causing significant left-side damage.

Keating, however, returned to action to qualify second in class later that afternoon before going on to take the class victory alongside co-driver Ben Hanley in the fifth LMP2 round of the season.

“I can’t say enough about the team effort that this was,” said Keating. “It’s nice any time you can win one of these races because they’re so competitive.

“But it feels like I’m paying back a little bit of the hard work that the team put in.

“It was just amazing for them to basically completely rebuild the car, replace the transmission, do all of that, in between Practice 2 and get it ready before qualifying.

“[It wasn’t just about] getting the car ready, but the car felt really, really good when I got into qualifying. I had no problem going out there and pushing again after having a big incident.

“The car felt equally good going into the race.

“We qualified second, on the front row. I was able to take the lead into Turn 1 and we just had a great car. It felt so good throughout the race.

“It was a crazy race. There was a lot of safety cars and incidents and stuff happening all over the place.

“For once, we got lucky. We made all the right calls at the right time.”

Sunday’s victory not only marked Keating’s first WeatherTech Championship win in a year, but it was also the maiden triumph for the Richard Dean and Zak Brown-owned United crew in series’ competition.

“The team is incredibly well run but we’ve been incredibly unlucky,” said Keating.

“We’ve been run into at no fault of our own in two of the previous four races. We had a mechanical and have gotten unlucky on the timing of the yellow flags and whatever.

“Today we made all the right decisions, all the right calls. The full-course yellows came out at the perfect time for us.

“We just kept plugging along knowing that eventually our pace and our performance would come to the top.

“We came into this season hoping to win a championship. With the first four races not having gone our way, having not been on a podium, that seemed pretty far out of reach.

“But today was a pretty good points day. The top three cars in the championship were not on the podium.”

Keating and Hanley have now moved into fourth in the championship, 97 points out of the lead with two races to go.

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