Sellers, Snow Able to “Control the Race” in GTD Contest

Photo: IMSA

Bryan Sellers said that he and Madison Snow were able to “control the race” in Saturday’s Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach, in what came as a long-awaited return to victory lane for Paul Miller Racing and Lamborghini.

Sellers and Snow notched their first IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship win in 18 months, dominating the GT Daytona class in their Lamborghini Huracan GT3 Evo that led all but five laps of the 100-minute contest.

While having started on pole courtesy of Snow’s fast lap in qualifying, Sellers managed to take a 11-second victory over the competition in the deep 17-car class field.

“It was a great day,” said Sellers. “We were able to control the race. One of the biggest things about street course racing is being out front in clean air. 

“Your day gets a lot easier when you’re able to do that. You’re able to focus forward and not be stuck behind people.

“Luckily today, the traffic flow was pretty clean. 

“This is a tough place for a lot of the prototype guys to race with us because we slow them down pretty heavily in a lot of places. 

“Most of them were pretty generous with us today, which was why I think you saw so much green flag racing.”

The race only featured a single full-course caution early on — for debris — which set up a 1 hour and 21-minute green flag run to the checkered flag.

Sellers said he was proud of their achievement in not only breaking through for Paul Miller’s first win of the season but also putting the team into championship contention with two GTD rounds remaining.

The duo have moved into second in the points standings, 32 points behind Pfaff Motorsports’ Laurens Vanthoor and Zach Robichon ahead of next month’s Michelin GT Challenge at Virginia International Raceway.

“To win one or two races in a season is a difficult feat,” Sellers said. “In GTD right now, and everywhere, the competition is so steep. 

“You just have to have the perfect day to win the race. You can’t fall back, you can’t have a bad qualifying and you can’t certainly have a bad pit stop.

“So to finally get one this year is nice. You feel like you’ve been carrying this monkey on your back until you do. 

“Hopefully it jump starts something for us. Hopefully now that we have that one off we can just continue to focus forward and see where we end up.”

Sellers added: “As far as the championship goes, I think we approach it a little bit differently than most. We try and focus every weekend to produce the best result we can.

“I think we really feel like — much as everybody — if you give everything you have on the weekend the likelihood is that you’ll walk away with something and it’s going to be pretty good.

“We’ll go into these final two rounds… We’re sitting second. That’s kind of an enviable place to be because you can just attack. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

“The 9 car has been strong; they’ve won three races and we’re going to have to find a way to slow them down. 

“We’ll go to VIR and then Petit and just look for another win or two and see what we can do.”

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