Telitz stands out at Road America
ELKHART LAKE – They’re holding a sportscar race Sunday at Road America, not a popularity contest. Still, the cool kids are sitting pretty.
On the front row for the IMSA SportsCar Weekend main event will be Acura prototypes codriven by men with five Indianapolis 500 victories between them, Helio Castroneves and Juan Pablo Montoya. And leading the GT Daytona class in qualifying Saturday was Birchwood native Aaron Telitz.
“I’ve gone to a lot of tracks and Road America is the only one where I really see people walking around wearing Aaron Telitz shirts and they’re saying hi and hello to me,” said Telitz, who along with Jack Hawksworth, will go for a third straight victory Sunday.
“It’s just cool to have fans that are there to see me race. It sounds kind of weird to say, but I’m not a big name or anything like that. People know I’m from Wisconsin and they like supporting Wisconsin people, so I love that.”
The timed race of 2 hours 40 minutes is scheduled for 11:05 a.m. Sunday.
A front-row sweep was an important accomplishment for Team Penske, which is winless this season and told its drivers recently they can look for work elsewhere next season, after its relationship with Acura ends.
Ricky Taylor, driving the No. 7 entry shared by three-time Indy winner Helio Castroneves, set the pace with a lap of 1 minute 49.061 seconds around the rolling, 4.048mile, 14-turn course. Dane Cameron, who teams with Juan Pablo Montoya, was second at 1:49.379.
“It’s really important to get these little results,” said Taylor, who won his 20th IMSA pole and second at Road America. “We’ve had such a tough season this year with little things going wrong here and there. Even though it’s not a race win, it’s really nice to keep all the guys motivated and excited to go out tomorrow.
“We’ve shown good pace all weekend, so to convert it to a race win would be really, really amazing to get the monkey off our back to turn the season around.”
Taylor and Castroneves haven’t won since 2018. Cameron and Montoya took the championship last season with three victories.
Telitz, with a lap of 2:06.251 in the No. 14 Lexus RC F GT3, beat AIM Valler Sullivan Lexus teammate Frankie Montecalvo by more than three-quarters of a second for his first pole position. Telitz and co-driver Jack Hawksworth have won both races since the season resumed.
“Everybody knows that qualifying and the race are two different animals so it’s going to be interesting tomorrow,” Telitz said.
The entire six-car GT Le Mans field qualified within 0.612 of a second, grouped more tightly than the GTD gap from first to second.
Laurens Vanthoor led the way for Porsche with a 2:00.590 lap. Corvette Racing, which came into the weekend with a tworace winning streak, was second-fastest with Jordan
Taylor and third with Oliver Gavin.
Patrick Kelly set the pace among the four cars in LMP2, the secondfastest class, at 1:52.618.
Kelly won last year at Road American in his first race in nine years after suffering near-fatal injuries in a traffic accident.
Prototype Challenge: In one of stranger finishes in racing, Scott Andrews lost two positions between the white flag and checkered but still picked up the victory when officials ruled the final lap didn’t count.
Because the entire field was saving fuel, the pace of the 1-hour-45minute tied race slowed dramatically. Andrews did not reach the white flag with enough time left to complete one more lap, meaning the race had officially ended and Dakota Dickerson’s dramatic passes from fifth to first for the apparent victory were for naught.
Porsche GT3 Cup: Twenty-two-year-old Canadian Jeff Kingsley got a 10-minute reprieve during cleanup of a crash in the Kink and then pulled away in a one-lap shootout.