ELKHART LAKE, WI (Sunday, August 18) – GT America powered by AWS championship leader Johnny O’Connell, scored a pair of podium finishes at Road America to maintain his championship lead this weekend.
The pair of third-place finishes looked like a distant dream on Friday for the SKI Autosports squad after suffering a clutch issue aboard the team’s No.3, Audi R8 LMS GT3 Evo II.
O’Connell missed valuable track time sitting on the sidelines for both 60-minute sessions and entered Saturday morning’s qualifying session without completing a single lap of the 4.0-mile Road America circuit.
The veteran qualified fifth fastest but was strong in the race, which was run under dark skies and with torrential rain. Several laps were run under a safety car before O’Connell pulled out a solid drive to finish third behind championship rival Jason Daskalos.
More importantly, O’Connell recorded the second-fastest lap of the race to earn himself a front-row spot on the grid for Sunday’s 40-minute journey.
Run on a dry track, O’Connell ran third early and came under pressure from Daskalos in the middle of the race. However, the SKI Autosports driver was able to open a comfortable gap by the checkered flag to finish with an 18-second advantage.
The net result of the weekend was that O’Connell led the championship by eight points—the same advantage he held prior to the weekend.
Next up for SKI Autosports is the penultimate weekend of GT America competition at Alabama’s Barber Motorsport Park on September 6-8.
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JOHNNY O’CONNELL
”So what started out as a kind of challenging weekend for us with the clutch issue on Friday, turned into a pretty good weekend considering we lost an entire day,” O’Connell said.
“We got a really good third place yesterday in the wet and kind of took a swing at things for the setup today and came up with something pretty good, which got us on the podium again today.
“We could match the pace of the guys at the front, but, lost a little bit of time early in the race.
“But we’re in this for a championship – that is the focus.
“I just can’t say enough about everybody at SKI Autosports. They put in a lot of effort on Friday to find the issue, repair it, and once again give me a great race car.
“We’ve held onto the lead and our next race is at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama – a track I can’t recall whether I have had a win there – so I’d like to make that happen.
“Four races to go and our sights remain firmly on what we need to do to clinch this championship.”
