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Photo: Julien Delfosse/DPPI Genesis Magma Racing team principal Cyril Abiteboul has said the postponement of the Qatar FIA World Endurance Championship opener brought both positives and negatives for the manufacturer’s debut season. The WEC was due to kick off with an 1812km, ten-hour race in Qatar at the end of March, but this was postponed until October amid the escalating conflict in the Middle East. This gave Genesis an extra three weeks before the new season opener at Imola, which Abiteboul said was very helpful from a manufacturing point of view as parts for the GMR-001 Hypercar were still being constructed. “It was going to be very tight, very marginal to be fully ready for Qatar in particular in terms of supply chain because we pushed very late the development, we pushed very late the homologation,” he told Sportscar365. “For that respect, governance was very helpful to make it very late. “But, on the flip side, it puts massive constraint on...

Source: Sports Car 365

Image: WRT The No. 69 WRT BMW M4 GT3 EVO will sport the colors of ‘Genuine BMW Parts’ liveries from the past, but with a modern twist, in this weekend’s second round of the FIA World Endurance Championship season at Spa-Francorchamps. Revealed on Tuesday, the LMGT3 entry of Anthony McIntosh, Parker Thompson and Dan Harper, who won last time out in the program’s debut, the design offers a look beneath the skin of the M4 GT3 EVO, as well as featuring a flash of BMW M colors. It is the second of eight special liveries to be featured on the No. 69 entry this year, with FIA Bronze-rated driver McIntosh having elected to showcase a different BMW heritage or throwback livery on the car at each WEC round this season. The team won at Imola with a Tic Tac-inspired livery that was raced on BMW E30 M3 in the 1991 DTM season. McIntosh, Thompson and Harper hold a seven-point lead over TF Sport’s Nicky Catsburg, Jonny Edgar and Blake McDonald heading into Saturday...

Photo: Chris duMond/IMSA For IMSA Airbnb Endurance Challenge LMP3 competitors, both the Circuit of The Americas racetrack in Austin and the race length will be bigger than the last time they were there at the end of February. As part of the full IMSA VP Racing SportsCar Challenge season, LMP3 ran alongside GSX competitors at COTA during the series’ most recent sprint weekend featuring two 45-minute races. That took place at the COTA National Course, a 2.4-mile, 20-turn circuit with a cut-through near the end of the Esses and going onto the back straight. In the Airbnb Endurance Challenge event this weekend, they get the full COTA experience: all 3.4 miles of the Grand Prix track and the two-hour race length for the single Saturday race. That makes what was gained at the end of February useful for the majority of the circuit, with still a fair bit to learn for the rest of the track. A total of ten cars are entered for the race, with the new-for-2026 BMW M2 Challenge class not pres...

Source: Sports Car 365

Tire strategy played a central role in Sunday’s StubHub Monterey SportsCar Championship at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, as Laurin Heinrich’s late-race charge to victory for the No. 5 JDC-Miller Motorsports Porsche 963 was built on a calculated call that paid off on the final lap. JDC-Miller opted to take four Michelin tires on their second-to-last stop, then pitted for energy only in their final stop, banking on the same set of tires to pay off in the closing stages. They did. Heinrich made a last-lap pass on Earl Bamber’s No. 31 Action Express Racing Cadillac V-Series.R and held on for a 0.758-second win. “I think our strength was on tires, which we could really make use of in the last four or five laps,” said Heinrich. “You have to set up the car quite well because this is a high-load track and the asphalt is quite rough, so it’s quite hard on the tires. “And the team asked me if I want to change tires or not and this was the ...

Photo: Wes Duenkel/Ford Devin Anderson broke through to claim his first career Mustang Challenge North America victory in Sunday’s mixed-condition Race 2 of the weekend at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. Anderson took his No. 22 TechSport Racing Ford Mustang Dark Horse R to a 0.929-second win over the No. 7 Wheelhouse Motorsports entry of Sandy Satullo following a two-minute shootout to the finish after a late-race full-course caution. Will Lucas completed the podium in the No. 34 Wheelhouse Mustang. While all cars started on wet-weather Michelin tires, Anderson blasted away from pole, which saw Race 1 winner Cole Loftsgard, drop down the running order in his No. 42 Round 3 Racing Mustang. On a quickly drying track, Loftsgard dropped back as far as fifth by the time the yellow came out for Paolo Salvatore, who became beached in Turn 2 with seven minutes to go. Loftsgard retook fourth from Ryan Persing, with Nolan Allaer coming home sixth in the No. 3 Spark Performance entr...