IF YOU GO
Petit Le Mans is a 10-hour or 1,000-mile sports car race featuring four classes of cars (Prototype, Prototype Challenge, GT Le Mans and GT Daytona)
All running at the same time. There also are preliminary races for other sports car divisions.
Practice begins Wednesday at Road Atlanta in Braselton. Qualifying for Petit begins at 3:20 p.m. Friday, and the main event gets the green flag at 11:10 a.m. Saturday.
For more information visit www.roadatlanta.com
For many fans in the NASCAR world, road races have become the new Bristol in that NASCAR road races now feature the bumping and rubbing that used to be associated more with the half-mile bullring in the Tennessee mountains.
That new way of looking at racing is not lost on many of the sports-car racers who regularly race on road courses such as Road Atlanta in Braselton, where the 18th Petit Le Mans will be run Saturday. It’s the grand finale of a four-day event.
Ricky Taylor, who teamed with his brother Jordan and Max Angelelli to win last year’s Petit Le Mans, said his circuit’s style of racing does offer much of what NASCAR fans love to see.
“It is short-track style, with a lot of contact,” said Taylor, who drives the No. 10 Chevrolet Corvette Daytona Prototype fielded by his father’s Wayne Taylor Racing team. “It does feel like a bullring, especially with four classes running at the same time.
“There’s a lot of over-taking, with fast cars passing slower ones just like at Bristol, only it goes on a lot longer.”
In the case of Petit Le Mans, it goes on for 10 hours, making the race one of the cornerstone endurance events in American sports-car racing. It’s also the season finale for the IMSA TUDOR United SportsCar Championship.
Taylor said that when all is said and done, whether it’s NASCAR racing or TUDOR sports-car racing, it’s one big sport.
“Racing is basically all the same,” he said. “Hopefully there is a lot of crossover between NASCAR fans and sports-car fans. The more the merrier, and one of the upsides to that is there can be more sponsor dollars flowing to sports-car teams.”
Taylor’s father, Wayne Taylor, was a driver on the winning team for the first Petit Le Mans in 1998, and now the team looks to close its season with another Petit Le Mans win.
“We’ve had an up-and-down season, where we’ve either been on the podium or out of the race,” Ricky Taylor said. “We’re out of the championship, so we’re looking at Petit as a chance to end the season on a good note and kick off the off-season in a positive manner.”
Taylor said he enjoys driving the 2.54-mile, 12-turn track, which he describes as an old-school layout.
“It’s super fast,” he said. “It’s tough to pass, and you never get a chance to rest. It’s one of the best tracks in the country.”
Braselton’s Bryan Sellers, who is one of the drivers of the No. 17 Team Falken Tire Porsche 911 RSR in the GT Le Mans class, agrees that his home track is a fun place to race.
Sellers’ team has won its class in the past two Petit Le Mans, which puts it in an odd spot this year.
“Some people look at it and will say that if we do win, we’re supposed to, and if not it’s because we messed up,” Seller said.
Sellers also has a lot riding on his Petit Le Mans performance as he hopes to end the season with a strong run. This race will be the last for his Falken Tire team. The team is a privateer, meaning it is not among those backed by the auto manufacturer, and Seller said the decision has been made to spend company resources elsewhere in large part because of the increasing cost of racing.
“We’re trying to go out with a bang,” he said. “We have no hopes for a championship, so we’re in position to be aggressive and take risks that other people are reluctant to take.”
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