Knowing his team was out of the title hunt gave Sheldon van der Linde the ultimate freedom to attack on Sunday afternoon.
With no points lead to protect, van der Linde capitalized on Earl Bamber’s conservative championship mindset to drive the #24 BMW M Hybrid V8 to a dramatic victory alongside co-driver Dries Vanthoor in the Battle on the Bricks at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
“I knew obviously that they wouldn’t take too much risk being in the championship fight, so I had that in the back of my mind going into the race already,” van der Linde said. “That was our advantage – that we could play elbows out and they couldn’t. I knew I had to use that to our advantage.”
For most of the penultimate round of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship on IMS’s 2.439-mile, 14-turn road course, the two-hour, 40-minute sprint race was controlled by the #31 Action Express Racing Cadillac V-Series.R of Earl Bamber and points leader Jack Aitken. On raw pace, the Cadillac held the upper hand, leaving van der Linde to bide his time through heavy traffic until his pit wall delivered the call to strike.
“My engineer said to me on the radio, ‘You’ve got one more pack of GTs with 10 minutes to go,’ and I knew that’s my last chance to get him, because on pace they were just too fast for us today,” van der Linde said. “So, I tried to stay close to him before that. He got stuck behind a GT car going into Turn 10, and I got a very good run and kind of went all the way to the inside so he wasn’t able to see me in his mirrors.
“I was willing to risk everything for the win today.”
Forced to weigh a risky defense against their driver’s standings lead, the #31 crew could not match van der Linde’s aggression. The South African completed the decisive pass with an inside move under both Bamber and a slower GT car into Turn 12 to seal BMW’s first GTP class victory in over a year.
The breakthrough delivered immense relief for the Vincent Vosse-led BMW M Team WRT operation, which had built its North American program from scratch in a matter of months.
“During the whole season we’ve always been a bit in the mix and fighting for victories… and just never really been able to put everything together,” Vanthoor said. “Today we did. It’s just a great relief for also me and Sheldon, but also I think for the team, for WRT, everybody’s working so hard. Everybody’s been pushing so hard this season.
“They built up the team in a couple of months and it’s so difficult to build up a team in such a short time, and also in a way that you don’t really have the experience. You always have the experience in Europe but then you come to the US it is just different. But now to have that relief gone, we’re super happy and we’re super proud of it.”
While the victory marked Vanthoor’s second career GTP win, it was van der Linde’s first overall WeatherTech Championship victory – completing a missing piece on the team’s resume after a season hampered by several near-misses since the Rolex 24 At Daytona.
“Came close in Laguna, Detroit, Road America. So, three different events where we came close and we never really got to stand on the top step which hurt. Never mind we didn’t even get on the podium in those races,” van der Linde said.
“It’s nice to give a reward back to the team now for all the work that they’ve put in the last two years to build up this program first of all and now obviously to materialize it and get a good result is a dream come true.”
