Four championships raced for two hours and forty minutes at Indianapolis on Sunday 20 September, and the provisional points sheet posted with the results shows two of them with a new leader: LMP2 turned over by four points and GTD Pro by 47. A third, GTD, kept its leaders and lost five sixths of their margin, Winward Racing going into the race 36 points clear and coming out six. The fourth, GTP, has Jack Aitken 147 points ahead of Laurin Heinrich with one round left, Petit Le Mans on 3 October, and the only question that class has to answer at Road Atlanta is whether the arithmetic holds.
Dries Vanthoor and Sheldon van der Linde won the race itself in the No. 24 BMW M Hybrid V8, 2:41:13.430 for 112 laps, 2.926 seconds ahead of the No. 31 Cadillac of Aitken and Earl Bamber, with Heinrich and Kevin Estre third in the No. 6 Porsche at 5.202, per the unofficial classification. The leader sequence is short: Tom Blomqvist's pole-sitting No. 60 Acura led laps 1 to 24, the No. 31 led laps 25 to 47 and 52 to 106, the sister No. 25 BMW led laps 49 to 51, and the winning No. 24 led lap 48 and then laps 107 to 112. Seven laps in front across the afternoon, six of them the last six, and the first WeatherTech Championship win for WRT in its first season running BMW's factory GTP programme, per Sportscar365.
Lap 107, Turn 12, and a Mustang in the way
The pass came with five minutes and thirty seconds on the clock, per the Indianapolis Motor Speedway release carried in full by WISH-TV. Both prototypes arrived at Turn 12 on Dennis Olsen's Ford Mustang, running second in GTD Pro at the time. Bamber went left to clear the Mustang; van der Linde went right, dived to the inside, and kept the lead to the flag. It was the second time in seven minutes the two had been alongside: with 7:10 remaining they ran side by side through Turns 7 and 8 and Bamber held on. The release also prints the gap that had been protecting him, 1.282 seconds with 27 minutes left, cut to 0.287 by traffic on the next lap, rebuilt to 1.516 with 21 minutes left when van der Linde was the one held up.
Race control's log records an incident between cars 31 and 24 put under review at 2:34:06 elapsed and a warning to car 31 for incident responsibility at 2:34:56, per the flags and messages file. The lap-107 lead change falls in the same minutes. No document held by Paddock Notes says the reviewed contact and the winning pass were one event, and this piece does not join them. "He sent it up the inside and made it stick," was Vanthoor's account in the release.
The stop that set up the finish was made under yellow. The race's second full-course caution came at 1:36:13 elapsed on lap 68, for debris at Turn 13, and the green flew at 1:51:45 on lap 74. The IMS release puts the final pit stops inside that window with 57 minutes remaining and says the WRT crew moved van der Linde from third to second behind Bamber on the stop itself. Sportscar365 records Heinrich, who had run second after a short-fill first stop, dropping to fifth in the same cycle and recovering close to ten seconds in the last stint to finish third. The restart came with 48 minutes to go, and van der Linde spent most of them, in his own words, "really frustrated" because Bamber "always got a run on me on the GTs" through Turns 5 and 6.
GTD: back of the class to 0.501 behind
Race control's log opens at 15:02:16, eight minutes before the green flag, with one line: "Car 57: Penalty, Violation of Sporting Regulation Art. 42.1, Back of Class." Both GT qualifying sessions had been abandoned for lightning on Saturday, so the grids were set on championship order and the points-leading No. 57 Winward Mercedes of Russell Ward and Philip Ellis held class pole on paper. Sportscar365 says Ward missed the pit entry on the reconnaissance lap. From the back, the car finished second in class, 0.501 seconds behind the No. 96 Turner Motorsport BMW of Patrick Gallagher and Robby Foley, which led laps 71 to 104 of a 104-lap class race. Ellis and Ward hold the class lead on 2693 points against 2687, which is to say they kept it by finishing half a second behind the two men chasing them. Turner's previous class win was Road America in August 2024, per NBC Sports, and the team dedicated this one to Matt Dalton, per the release.
GTD Pro was a fuel race decided by a car that did not win it. The No. 59 RLL McLaren of Nikita Johnson led laps 67 to 102, having taken two warnings for the Controlled Powertrain Parameters at 1:21:28 and 1:23:48 elapsed, and the release says Johnson pitted for fuel with one minute remaining. The No. 59 finished eighth in class, a lap down. That left Olsen's No. 64 Ford and Nicky Catsburg's No. 4 Corvette for the win, and they made contact on the final lap; race control reviewed it after the flag and took no action. Olsen and Ben Barker won by 0.993 for Barker's first WeatherTech Championship victory, per Sportscar365. "I felt sorry for shoving him wide," Olsen said in the release. "But at the same time, I had this prototype inside and didn't know what to do." Catsburg and Tommy Milner take the points lead on 2729 against 2682 for Connor De Phillippi and Neil Verhagen, whose No. 1 Paul Miller BMW led laps 1 to 51, took a mechanical black flag at 1:35:37, spun at Turn 10 at 2:21:33, and finished sixth.
LMP2 was decided by the opening lap and by a penalty two hours later. The first full-course caution came at 27.8 seconds elapsed for an incident at Turn 1; the No. 04 CrowdStrike car of George Kurtz and Alex Quinn, leading the class by 26 points after Saturday's qualifying points, went behind the wall and was classified ninth, 42 laps down. Paul di Resta's No. 22 United Autosports car led laps 53 to 86, then served a drive-through for a pass under yellow logged at 2:06:45. Christian Rasmussen, sharing the No. 18 Era Motorsport ORECA with Nick Boulle in a one-off pairing, led from lap 87 to the end and won by 15.004 seconds while saving fuel, Era's first class win since Sebring in March 2024, per Sportscar365. The No. 43 Inter Europol car of Jeremy Clarke and Tom Dillmann, which had led laps 1 to 21, stopped for a splash of fuel and finished sixth, one lap down, and still took the class lead: 1950 points to 1946.
GTP: the sum
Aitken has 2752 points to Heinrich's 2605, per the provisional sheet, with Nick Yelloly and Renger van der Zande on 2481 and Bamber fourth on 2404 after missing Long Beach. Cadillac leads the manufacturers' table by 136, 2914 to Porsche's 2778, and NBC Sports says it will clinch the title when one of its cars starts at Road Atlanta. Petit Le Mans runs on 3 October with all four classes. Van der Zande set the race's fastest lap, a 1:16.610 on lap 77 in the No. 93 Acura that finished seventh, per the fastest lap sheet.
One column on the points sheet is worth reading twice. Every GT car's qualifying points for Indianapolis read 0, which is what an abandoned session produces, so the GTD Pro and GTD fights go to the finale with a full 35 qualifying points back on the table. The classification this piece is built from is headed "Unofficial", the second of Al Kamel's three states; if the Official version moves a figure, this piece will carry the correction.