A stuck throttle put Tom Dillmann into the Mosport wall and broke two vertebrae last year. He went back and took the lead with an hour and a quarter to go..

Twenty minutes from the end of last year's race at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, Tom Dillmann was leading and his throttle stuck open. The ORECA went into the Turn 3 wall on the final restart, hard enough to break two vertebrae. He had surgery, and he missed a single round.

On Sunday he won the place back. Jeremy Clarke put the No. 43 Inter Europol ORECA 07-Gibson on pole with a new LMP2 track record, and the pair took the Chevrolet Grand Prix by 9.796s. The car led 93 of the 127 laps.

Clarke started it and led. The race then went away from Inter Europol for most of an hour: a full-course yellow cycled George Kurtz to the front, Misha Goikhberg ran long on an alternate strategy in the Bryan Herta ORECA, and Alex Quinn inherited the lead in the CrowdStrike car when Goikhberg finally pitted. Dillmann had to go and take it back.

He got it with roughly an hour and a quarter to go, when Quinn caught slower GT cars at Turn 1 and lost enough momentum for the Inter Europol car to come around the outside at Clayton Corner. Quinn was straightforward about it afterwards: "I think I'm critical of myself and maybe [I had] a slight mistake or [was] a bit unlucky in traffic and that's when Tom got past. It was a fun race. Tom's a great driver. It was intense and high commitment. You couldn't make one mistake."

The championship is now a real one

Kurtz and Quinn finished second and still lead the LMP2 standings by 70 points, with three races to go. Dillmann and Clarke's win moved them up to second in the class.

Seventy points and three races is the shape of the rest of their season. Inter Europol took pole, set the class lap record, led 93 of 127 laps, won, and came away with a championship position rather than a championship. Team principal Sascha Fassbender put it on the drivers and the pit lane in equal measure: "Tom and Jeremy both did a fantastic job without making any mistakes, and the team operated very well throughout the race. The pit stops were smooth, everything was exactly as it should be, and we executed the race perfectly."

Worth noting, because the redemption framing tends to bury it: Dillmann has now won at this circuit twice in three years. Mosport is not a track he has been afraid of. It is one he happens to be very good at, and which once handed him a stuck throttle at the worst possible moment.

Vasser Sullivan go back to back, Winward double up

Ben Barnicoat and Jack Hawksworth took GTD Pro in the No. 14 Vasser Sullivan Lexus RC F GT3, a second straight win after ending a two-year drought at Watkins Glen. Barnicoat credited an early call to short-fill the car rather than take a full load of fuel, which jumped him up the order, and he then caught Nikita Johnson's RLL McLaren napping at the restart. He won by 1.993s. It was the RC F GT3's 20th WeatherTech Championship victory and Vasser Sullivan's first at CTMP.

Nick Tandy and Harry King brought the AO Racing Porsche home second, 0.745s clear of the championship-leading Paul Miller BMW of Connor De Phillippi and Neil Verhagen, who stretched their GTD Pro lead to 108 points with four rounds left. Philip Ellis and Russell Ward won GTD for Winward, leading 65 laps in the Mercedes-AMG and becoming the class's first repeat winner of the season. Robert Wickens, whose hand controls a supplier coalition rebuilt in four weeks after a transporter fire destroyed them, finished last in the class at his home race.

The weekend LMP2 headlines

GTP does not come to CTMP, which leaves LMP2 as the fastest thing on the property and the class at the top of the timing screen. The Cadillacs that led 143 of 182 laps at Watkins Glen were not on the entry list. The weekend delivered a two-hour-forty-minute race that ran caution-free for its final hour and 47 minutes and was settled by a driver having to overtake for it.

All four classes reconvene at Road America on August 2 for IMSA's first six-hour race at that circuit. Dillmann called Sunday a cool story, which is one way to describe going back to the circuit that broke your spine and leaving with the trophy.