Late caution changes race as Random Vandals Racing capitalizes to win GT World Challenge America finale at Sonoma
By Kyle Foster, photo courtesy of Eric Thompson (Shamboozled.com)
Twitter/X: @NapaKyle @NapaSportsNews
Sonoma-The nice thing about racing is the fact that you don’t have to lead every lap or dominate to celebrate. You just have to lead the last one or two.
In Sunday’s GT World Challenge America presented by AWS finale, this is what the Random Vandals Racing team of Connor De Phillippi and Kenton Koch did as they won the second race of the season at Sonoma Raceway as part of the series’ opening weekend.
With just two laps left in the race, Koch was able to make the pass on Alex Sedgwick going up the hill to win the race. He held on the last lap to win by a margin of 1.5 seconds.
“Alex just made a mistake in the final corner, and we had more straight line speed, and I was able to drive up the inside of one, and we held it side by side through two,” Koch said of the race-winning pass. “It was tricky because he was strong in the low-speed stuff, direction change, and I was struggling with that whole section. Basically, when he made the mistake, that was the only way I was gonna get by him.”
This was also Koch’s first win in the GT3 class. It also made the post-race celebration mean more.
The Random Vandals team wouldn’t have had a chance to win the race had they not gotten a late caution with just 20 minutes left in the race to bunch everyone back up.
“Yeah, thankfully, the yellow came,” Koch added. “Otherwise we would have had no chance to catch up to them with that. Then we were able to fight, essentially, for the win.
However, the most dominant car of the race was Crowdstrike by Riley, driven by Colin Braun and George Kurtz. In the opening portion of the race, Braun was able to get a lead of 4 seconds. But this was due to having clean air because after they swapped drivers and put Kurtz in the car, they lost track position. When the checkered flag waved, they finished the day in the 6th position overall and second in the Pro-am class.
Winning the Pro-Am class and finishing 4th in the 53-lap race was the Regulator Racing team of Jeff Burton and Phillip Ellis. They initially fell back to 14th early on and rallied back to win their class.
The series will be back in action on April 26th and 27th from Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas.
GR Cup Races won by two different winners
In the Toyota GR Cup, the pair of 45-minute events was won by different drivers. This showcases the parity that is in the series this season.
In Saturday’s event, it was Lucas Weisenburg who was able to get just his second GR Cup win. He led wire-to-wire but had to hold off a late charge from Westin Workman to get the victory.
“Yeah, definitely a tricky course,” Weisenburg said after his win on Saturday and before wrecking out on Sunday. “Weather’s been up and down all weekend. Tomorrow looks a little different, but today great way to start the season, pole, led every lap, and it looks like a good start to the domination year for your championship run.”
Over the final half of that race, Workman cut down the lead and found plenty of lap time all over the course. He did this by having a solid setup and knowing what was needed.
In Sunday’s race, the track conditions were much different, as the race started under damp conditions. This meant a single-file start, and qualifying would make everything much more important.
Getting his first career win in that race was Will Robusto. It was a big moment as he was welcomed at the podium celebration by his family, who were on hand for the event.
“This is pretty big to get my first win at SRO,” Robusto said. “So track conditions were a little bit varied at the start, but after the sun came out, dried everything out.”
On top of all of that, it was also the first win for the team that Robusto drives for in RVA Graphics Motorsports. This was his fourth start with the team.
“That’s big,” Robusto added. “I ran with them twice last year, and I just see how much they want to win. So it feels good to get them this one.”
The series will be back in action on April 26th and 27th from COTA in Austin, Texas.
