Karl Wittmer waited until the final lap to make his move. The MMG Honda driver passed for the lead with one lap remaining in the O’Reilly Auto Parts 4 Hours of Mid-Ohio on Sunday, taking the win in IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge TCR competition for the #93 Civic Type R TCR he shared with Dai Yoshihara and LP Montour.
The win came from the back of the field. A mid-race penalty dropped the MMG trio to the rear of the TCR class, and they spent the remainder of the four-hour event working forward. Wittmer led just one lap on the day, the one that mattered, pulling off what Montour called a signature move. “Karl just has something about last lap passes,” Montour said after the race. “We knew with Karl in the car at the end we would have a chance.”
The victory pushes Honda into second place in the IMPC TCR manufacturers’ championship. Mid-Ohio sits just over an hour’s drive from Honda’s Marysville, Ohio assembly plant, and Wittmer framed the result in those terms. “It means everything to win for Honda at Mid-Ohio,” he said. “This one is pretty special.”
KMW Motorsports with TMR Engineering started from pole position after Rocco Pasquarella set a new TCR track record in qualifying. Pasquarella and co-driver Tim Lewis led 75 laps, more than any other entry, before an alternator issue with 30 minutes remaining ended their run. They finished 11th, classified as not running.
The pole-to-mechanical-failure arc is the kind of outcome endurance racing produces with regularity, but the timing was sharp. KMW had the fastest car for most of the event and controlled the race until the alternator quit. The win was there; the hardware did not hold.
HART, the Honda team staffed primarily by drivers and mechanics from Honda’s automotive side, ran competitively at what the team calls its home event. Chad Gilsinger, Tyler Chambers, and Cameron Lawrence cycled into the lead during the race and looked set for a top-five finish before a cut tire late in the event dropped them to seventh. Pegram Racing’s #72 Civic, driven by the father-daughter pair of Larry and Riley Pegram along with Acura GTD champion Mario Farnbacher, did not finish after an air jack failure.
Yoshihara opened the race for MMG and framed his stint as a conservation exercise. “My number one goal was save the car for LP’s stint next,” he said. “There were a few times I could have pushed harder in that opening stint, but it was risky and I think being patient worked out.” Montour moved the team forward through the middle stints, setting up Wittmer’s closing run.
The last-lap pass itself drew praise from Wittmer for the competitor he overtook, identified only as Denny in the post-race quotes. “Props to Denny for keeping everything clean and for just some really good racing in that last stint that was really fun and respectful,” Wittmer said. The MMG team ran the race without contact across all three drivers, an achievement Montour highlighted as part of the performance.
Honda returns to Watkins Glen International on June 27 for the LP Building Solutions 120 at The Glen. MMG won at Watkins Glen in 2025.
Source: Honda. Images courtesy of Honda.
