By Tarek Ramchani
Detroit is hosting the fourth meeting of the Pirelli World Challenge season, a temporary street course at Belle Island.
Race 1 has already been held today, with some good performances from the GMG Racing Audi R8 LMS cars. The Detroit race weekend has a smaller grid when compared to the previous rounds, with only 9 cars in the upper GT class. Right from the start the safety car made its appearance after a KIA crashed on the front straight. The cars were forced to stay behind the safety car for several minutes. The race went back to green and James Sofronas, the series leader with his #14 Audi R8 LMS, started to battle with Cadillac's Andy Pilgrim for third place. A few minutes later there was another crash and the safety car was deployed again, for a long yellow flag period. When the race resumed Sofronas was very fast and continued to push Pilgrim, but the Audi driver was simply out of time. James Sofronas finished the race in fourth. The race win went to Johnny O'Connel in the Cadillac CTS-V ahead of Randy Pobst's semi-works Volvo S60 in second and Andy Pilgrim's Cadillac CTS-V in third.
Another GMG Racing Audi R8 LMS doing well was the #24 car of Duncan Ende. Despite being far from the leading group, Ende battled well for fifth place against a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG and a Porsche 997 GT3. Ende finished the race in seventh place.
Race 2 is set for tomorrow, a 50-minute sprint format. We wish the best of luck to James Sofronas and the whole GMG Racing Audi team.
Photo credit: Pirelli World Challenge
