Acura Meyer Shank Racing left Indianapolis Motor Speedway with a fifth and a seventh on Sunday, a result that accurately reflects a caution-heavy sprint race that neither ARX-06 was able to turn in its favor.
Tom Blomqvist had taken pole for the TireRack.com Battle on the Bricks with a 1m14.674s lap on the 2.439-mile IMS road course, his seventh career IMSA pole and the 25th for Meyer Shank Racing overall. From the front row, holding the lead through the opening full-course caution looked like a solid foundation. It wasn’t. After the team’s pit stop and driver change to Colin Braun, a wave of short-fill strategies by other entries cycled the #60 back to fourth, and then further. Braun tried a two-tire call on the final stop to manufacture something out of the closing laps. It produced some brief action and then nothing more. Fifth place.
“We just really struggled for race pace and we just got eaten up,” Blomqvist said. Braun was more measured: “P5 is a decent finish for us, especially because we’ve had our fair share of struggles on our side.”
The #93 had a harder afternoon. Nick Yelloly started fifth on the grid and was dropped to the back of the field before the opening lap was complete, contact from a competitor in Turn 2 doing the damage. Renger van der Zande then inherited the car for his stint, worked it back toward the top five, and was running sixth when a GTD PRO competitor struck him in the braking zone into Turn 7. That contact ended any realistic push for better than seventh. Van der Zande’s assessment was direct: “I think a P4 was possible today but I got hit by a GTD PRO competitor in the braking zone going into Turn 7, so that was a big loss there.”
Yelloly, for his part, traced the entire arc of the race back to that first-lap contact. “Our race was ruined in Turn 2, unfortunately,” he said. “I don’t think we really had the pace for much more” than seventh, but made clear that the incident-free ceiling was likely the same fifth the sister car finished.
The result puts both cars in a tight spot heading into the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship finale. Acura is running out of races to make an impression: the TireRack.com Battle on the Bricks was the penultimate round of the season, and neither ARX-06 had the outright pace to challenge at the front even when conditions cooperated.
What follows is Petit Le Mans at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta, September 30–October 3, a race with considerably more laps and considerably more room for strategy to matter. The #93 will carry its special ‘Thank You’ livery into the finale, the same commemorative scheme it has run for several rounds to mark the close of Acura’s IMSA program. That program’s record includes 14 team, driver, and manufacturer championships, 33 victories, 44 pole positions, and three wins at the Rolex 24 at Daytona. Road Atlanta will be the last race for any of it. Meyer Shank knows what it needs to do there.
Source: Acura. Images courtesy of Acura.
