Watkins Glen 6H - 2026

Race Report - Sam McConnell

The Glen 6 hour went a lot better than what I thought it was going to. Since me and Tony were doing the morning split we were expecting to be somehwere around the top 5 splits, we ended up split 2. We knew it could possibly be a tough race as soon as we saw we were one of the lowest rated gtps on the grid.

Throughout the week I had been perfecting the track and gained a lot of rating through that so I was confident in my pace but I wasn't sure if I could match some of the other teams. Despite our worries in at the start, Tony set a flyer to put us in p3 for the start.

The race start however didn't lean in our favour dropping to p5, but due to a crash and a team getting a pit - speed penalty we were back in the fight. Throughout the whole race we were battling purely from strategy but for the most part we were running in p1 or p2. The only concern was the incident limit as we had gained a lot of incident points early on. Nothing much happened in the middle of the race, we just got our heads down and found the laptime as we knew we had to as the team we were battling were on a full push strategy while we were fuel saving about 2 -3 laps more than them. The last stint came around and it was my turn to hop in however we had to pull of a 33 lap stint while in the past we only were doing 31 - 32 laps. This surpiringly wasn't a big issues, I made it on fuel barely making it across the line after coasting the last lap.

A strong finish in p3 after a gt3 gave us the drivethrough by not taking his normal line, it was still a great drive from me and Tony and a great debut for the team. It was definitley one to remember as my first special event podium.