Two customer Porsches on the grid, ninth and tenth at the flag. Round nine of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, run on Sunday 23 August at Virginia International Raceway in Alton, belongs in the file marked forgettable.
The format left little room to hide: two hours and forty minutes, GT cars only, no prototypes cutting through traffic. AO Racing and Wright Motorsports spent the weekend hunting for pace and never found it.
AO Racing goes long
Short on outright speed, the team tried something else. Harry King stayed out longer than any rival in the opening stint, which put the No. 77 911 GT3 R at the front for a spell. Handing over to fellow Briton Nick Tandy dropped the car back down the order, and the No. 77 came in with just under an hour left, among the first to take its final stop.
That call needed a caution. None arrived. A late drive-through penalty for contact finished off any recovery, and the car known as Rexy took the flag ninth in GTD Pro.
King made no attempt to dress it up. The team knew from lap one that the car lacked the performance for the podium it had managed earlier in the year, so it ran clean, hit its marks and gambled on strategy. The penalty in the final stint took away what was left.
Wright Motorsports in the same boat
In GTD, the green No. 120 911 GT3 R of Adam Adelson and Callum Ilott ran a clean race and crossed the line tenth in class. Adelson pointed to a shortfall in straight-line speed that made anything better unlikely, while admitting the team could have executed a few things better on its side.
What it means for the title fight
Tandy and King head into the last two races of the season fourth in the GTD Pro drivers’ standings, 67 points behind the leaders. That is a large gap with limited road left.
The weekend sits oddly next to Road America in early August, where Porsche locked up the IMSA Michelin Endurance Cup drivers’ and team titles despite a muted run from the factory 963s. Format explains much of it: VIR had no prototypes and no long-distance element, just a sprint where top speed counts.
Indianapolis next
The GTP prototypes return for round ten on the road course at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The Battle on the Bricks runs from 18 to 20 September, with Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta closing the season after that.
Seasons like this one are the cost of running a full campaign in GT racing. Our French-language background piece on Porsche in endurance racing puts these campaigns in a longer context.
An outlier on the calendar
The VIR round carried the Michelin GT Challenge name and ran on 22 and 23 August. It holds an unusual place in the IMSA season, being the one weekend where the GT cars race on their own, without prototype traffic to work around. On paper that favours customer teams. It also removes the full course cautions that prototype incidents tend to produce, and with them the strategy windows that follow. AO Racing paid for that.
The latest-generation 911 GT3 R, in its first full season in 2026, has taken two IMSA WeatherTech wins this year and stays in contention for the drivers’, teams’ and manufacturers’ titles. For a car campaigned by customer outfits against semi-works operations, that is a reasonable position with two rounds left.
Full results and standings are published by the championship’s official timekeeper. Readers following the European side of Porsche’s season can look back at the Supercup finale run at Zandvoort, or at the wider customer racing picture reshaped by the new 911 Challenge announced three days after this race.
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