With 85 minutes remaining in the TireRack.com Battle on the Bricks on Sunday, Jack Aitken was in street clothes in the pits at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Ninety minutes later, he was in a sweat-and-champagne soaked driver’s suit, celebrating a convincing overall and GTP class victory in the six-hour IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship race with Cadillac Whelen teammates Earl Bamber and Frederik Vesti.
SEE: Race Results
The Whelen team earned its first victory since capturing the 12 Hours of Sebring in March 2023, and this was the first victory of the season for Cadillac, which fields three cars in the class.
Pole sitter Aitken took Bamber’s spot in the cockpit of the No. 31 Cadillac Whelen Cadillac V-Series.R during the team’s final pit stop with 82 minutes left in the race. Originally, the team planned to have Bamber stay in the car until the checkered flag but instead opted for Aitken to finish what he started on the 14-turn, 2.439-mile road course.
“We’ve got a great team from A to Z, and that includes my teammates,” Aitken said. “Any one of us could have finished it off. We just thought with the length of the race and it was going, it was better to get a fresh one (driver) in. It was intense. I’m glad we did.”
Winners in the other three classes were the No. 11 TDS Racing ORECA LMP2 07 (drivers Mikkel Jensen, Hunter McElrea, Steven Thomas) in LMP2, the No. 64 Ford Multimatic Motorsports Ford Mustang GT3 (Sebastian Priaulx, Mike Rockenfeller) in GT Daytona Pro and the No. 70 Inception Racing Ferrari 296 GT3 (Brendan Iribe, Ollie Millroy, Frederik Schandorff) in GT Daytona.
The No. 31 Whelen Cadillac led the race and the GTP class after each of the six hours of this Michelin Endurance Cup event. But victory was anything but easy, as two full-course caution periods in the last 75 minutes of the race forced Aitken to stand on the gas on restarts and navigate lapped traffic as the clock wound down.
The first of the last two full-course yellows came with one hour, 15 minutes to go when the hood flew off the No. 70 Inception Racing Ferrari that ended up winning the GTD class. Aitken held off the No. 25 BMW M Team RLL BMW M Hybrid V8 driven by Sheldon van der Linde on the restart with an hour to go and expanded his lead to 1.606 seconds with 30 minutes to go.
With 18 minutes remaining, Tom Blomqvist had pushed the No. 60 Acura Meyer Shank Racing w/ Curb Agajanian Acura ARX-06 to second place behind Aitken. The MSR prototype was the quickest in qualifying Saturday with Blomqvist behind the wheel but was moved to the rear of the 12-car GTP class on the starting grid due to failing to comply with bodywork rules in post-qualifying inspection.
Ricky Taylor then passed Blomqvist with 13 minutes remaining in the No. 10 Wayne Taylor Racing Cadillac V-Series.R for second place but probably needed a late caution to finish with his remaining fuel.
Taylor got that full-course caution with nine minutes left. The No. 04 Crowdstrike Racing by APR ORECA LMP2 car driven by NTT INDYCAR SERIES veteran Toby Sowery spun and backed hard into the wall after apparent contact from Indianapolis 500 veteran Ben Hanley.
Debris from the incident was cleaned just in time for a two-lap trophy dash to the checkered flag.
Aitken pulled away from Taylor on the restart and was never threatened, finishing .988 of a second ahead in a 1-2 result for Cadillac. NTT INDYCAR SERIES veterans Blomqvist and Colin Braun settled for third, 1.952 seconds behind the winners.
In LMP2, the TDS Racing team earned a class victory for the third consecutive year at this event. The team finished .714 of a second ahead of the No. 43 Inter Europol Competition ORECA LMP2 07 shared by Jeremy Clarke, Tom Dillmann and Bijoy Garg. Jensen drove the car to the checkered in the final stint, while McElrea added this win to a victory in August 2023 on the IMS road course in INDY NXT by Firestone.
“Very tense out there,” Jensen said. “We did the perfect race. No mistakes. Then you get a yellow at the end. Nerve-wracking finish, but you’ve got do a good restart and keep the car clean. It’s not easy to stay clear.”
Priaulx guided the Ford Multimatic Motorsports Mustang to victory by .594 of a second over the No. 81 DragonSpeed Ferrari 296 GT3 of Albert Costa and Davide Rigon in the factory-backed GTD PRO class.
In GTD, Inception Racing earned its first IMSA class victory despite losing its hood late in the race. Schandorff drove the Ferrari to victory over the No. 120 Wright Motorsports Porsche shared by Adam Adelson, Tom Sargent and Elliott Skeer by 2.276 seconds.
The TireRack.com Battle on the Bricks returns to IMS on Sept. 18-20, 2026. Visit IMS.com for ticket renewal or application information.
