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LEXINGTON, Ohio (May 6, 2018) – Jan Magnussen and Antonio Garcia earned a podium finish Sunday in Corvette Racing’s return to Mid-Ohio Sports Car in the Acura Sports Car Challenge at Mid-Ohio. The duo piloted their No. 3 Mobil 1/SiriusXM Chevrolet Corvette C7.R to a third-place finish in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship’s GT Le Mans (GTLM) class.
The result vaulted Garcia and Magnussen into a fourth-place tie for the GTLM Driver Championship with Corvette teammates Oliver Gavin and Tommy Milner. They placed eighth in GTLM on Sunday in the No. 4 Mobil 1/SiriusXM Chevrolet Corvette C7.R as the team returned to Mid-Ohio for the first time since 2012.
Chevrolet is third in GTLM Manufacturer points – three points out of first place – as Corvette Racing takes a break from IMSA competition to travel to the 24 Hours of Le Mans for the 19th consecutive season.
The Garcia/Magnussen duo began fifth, but Garcia gained a spot on the opening lap. The close level of competition and constant traffic around Mid-Ohio meant the No. 3 Corvette held its position for the middle of the race.
It wasn’t easy, especially for Magnussen who was part of a three-way fight for third place in class inside the final 40 minutes. He hung tough and made his move going into the first corner with 27 minutes left to move into podium position.
Milner and Gavin started eighth, but the No. 4 Corvette moved up through the field with a strong start from Milner. He drove the opening hour before handing off to Gavin. The No. 4 squad had some of the worst luck with traffic and opted to pit with 70 minutes left in hopes of catching a caution period to gain track position. Unfortunately the race went green for the entire two hours and 40 minutes. Gavin eventually had to take a late splash of fuel two laps from the end.
Corvette Racing’s next event is the 24 Hours of Le Mans on June 16-17. The team has won eight times in the French enduro.
ANTONIO GARCIA, NO. 3 MOBIL 1/SiriusXM CHEVROLET CORVETTE C7.R – FINISHED THIRD IN GTLM: “That was hard to watch, because I really don’t like to be watching! I prefer to be in the car. But Jan did a really, really, really good job. The whole race went according to plan. Fifth wasn’t good enough to be up front and fight for the win, but we started to make up positions like we always do. We started to see that strategy was a key thing here. We kind of managed to fight the Fords and we lost some time fighting them on everything. That is what probably allowed the 25 BMW to go crazy on strategy and that is when they went ahead of us. We learned from that, too. We are usually the ones doing crazy strategies like they did. It paid off for them. When you are in the lead pack, you need to do what we did. We got some good points over our competitors. I’m happy on how everything worked against the actual pace we had today. Porsche really deserved that win. Next time I will be a little bit faster in qualifying so we can fight for the win.”
JAN MAGNUSSEN, NO. 3 MOBIL 1/SiriusXM CHEVROLET CORVETTE C7.R – FINISHED THIRD IN GTLM: “For how things developed, this is not a bad result. Obviously we would like to have had the pace of the Porsche and BMW today but we kind of got in the middle of them, so only one of each got ahead. It was a good race… good strategy and good pit stops from the crew as usual. We had a good race car. It was all-around fun. I had really a fun battle with Joey (Hand). We got a little racey but it was good fun. Hopefully we get to have more good racing like that throughout the year. I really enjoyed it.“
OLIVER GAVIN, NO. 4 MOBIL 1/SiriusXM CHEVROLET CORVETTE C7.R – FINISHED EIGHTH IN GTLM: “We had to gamble a bit today. We were chasing a chassis imbalance all weekend, and we tried something in the warmup. But things just didn’t go our way with the start and traffic. Tommy really got balked in a couple spots, and it seemed like that happened more often than not to stop our progress. Then we had to come in with two laps left for a splash of fuel. It was that sort of day. It seemed like we had similar pace to everyone else a lot of the time but there wasn’t enough pace to get by anyone. It’s a bit of a frustrating day but we’ll move on and learn from this for the big one – Le Mans.”
TOMMY MILNER, NO. 4 MOBIL 1/SiriusXM CHEVROLET CORVETTE C7.R – FINISHED EIGHTH IN GTLM: “I was pretty happy with that first stint. We’re staying in touch with the cars ahead of us, depending on traffic. Maybe we were a little off but we were close enough where we could race of the most part. It’s definitely tough at Mid-Ohio. There aren’t a lot of tracks where you have a car that you’ve felt like you’ve worked on all weekend, and this is one of those. The racing was good and fun. It was chaotic at times with passing GTD cars and being passed by P cars. We struggled a little bit with balance, but I don’t think we’re alone on that. I didn’t seen anyone out there who was super happy with their cars.”
Article by Ryan Smith and Judy Kouba Dominick
Photo by Richard Prince
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