Heart of Racing led GTD all season without winning a race, and lost the lead at VIR to two penalties.
Eduardo Barrichello started Sunday's Michelin GT Challenge eleventh in class and led the GTD championship. He finished fourth in class and third in the championship, and the two things that moved him were both decisions rather than lap times. IMSA's own account of the weekend puts the first one before the race had started: "a technical infraction in qualifying cost the No. 27 car its two fastest laps and relegated the GTD points leader to an unrepresentative 11th to start Sunday's race," wrote David Phillips on Monday morning.
Barrichello drove through it. Helped by a full-course caution that bunched the field after Alexander Sims crashed the No. 3 Corvette heavily in the Climbing Esses on the opening lap, he took the class lead in the No. 27 Aston Martin Vantage GT3 Evo during his opening stint. The second decision arrived with the race almost done. Philip Ellis put the No. 57 Winward Mercedes-AMG down the inside at Turn 3, Tom Gamble made contact with him, and race control issued a drive-through for incident responsibility at 2:35:15 of a race that ran 2:41:29.130, so a little over six minutes from the flag.
Published accounts of when that happened disagree, and the reason is worth knowing. Sportscar365 has the penalty landing "with less than five minutes to go" and IMSA has Ellis making the pass "with seven minutes remaining," both of which are measured against the scheduled two-hour-forty-minute clock rather than against the 2:41:29 the race actually took. Neither is wrong on its own terms. Anyone reconciling them against the timing log needs to know which clock is being read.
Winward won by 6.413s over the No. 96 Turner BMW, its third straight GTD victory, and the No. 27 came home fourth, 8.917s off the class win. "It was good fun," Barrichello said of his opening stint, "but then we didn't complete the job, and we haven't completed the job this year." He was talking about a specific afternoon and describing a season. Barrichello has led the GTD drivers' championship since a run of three podiums in the opening four races, driving with what IMSA describes as a revolving cast of co-drivers, and he has not won a class race all year. At Sebring the No. 27 lost a win on the final lap to Antonio Fuoco. At VIR it lost one to a penalty.
"We've had a lot of penalties coming our way, and it's difficult to say what's wrong," Barrichello told IMSA. He had earlier told Sportscar365 that the drive-through was "a bit too harsh", noting that Gamble had conceded the position before the call and that "the other car didn't even go off track." Ellis, on the receiving end of the contact, agreed on the intent without disputing the outcome: "I don't think it was intentional by Tom by any means. He was just late on the brakes, on full ABS."
Ellis and Russell Ward now lead GTD by 36 points over second place, per IMSA, with Barrichello third. Sportscar365 puts Barrichello 56 points off the lead, a figure that matches the provisional post-race points sheet published by IMSA's official timing partner on Sunday evening. It is worth naming the provenance, because IMSA had not posted its own official post-VIR standings when this was written, and its public standings page was still serving the Road America file. The 24-point lead Barrichello carried into the weekend came from that Road America sheet, which is official.
Anyone repeating the 56 should check which class they are holding. IMSA's Monday piece states two different 56-point gaps four sentences apart. One is Barrichello's in GTD. The other belongs to Andrea Caldarelli and Sandy Mitchell, who are "now third in GTD PRO and only 56 off the lead" after winning the race outright in the No. 9 Pfaff Lamborghini Temerario GT3 by 1.517s. Two classes, two third places, two gaps of exactly 56, published in the same article on the same morning. The classes share a race weekend, a results page and now a number, and only one of those three carries a label.
Pfaff's own position is the odder one. The Temerario took its first pole in global competition on Saturday and its second win in two races on Sunday, a car that made its worldwide race debut at Sebring in March. "The championship was never even a topic within the team," Caldarelli said. "We know the mountain that we have to overcome with a new car." Chris Pfaff told Sportscar365 on 3 August that the team is pausing its WeatherTech programme at the end of the season, in his words "still trying to keep a foot in the door for 2027," so Lamborghini's quickest current GT3 operation reached title contention and announced its exit inside the same month.
Two rounds remain, at Indianapolis from 18 to 20 September and Petit Le Mans at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta from 30 September to 3 October. Ward, who has spent the summer catching the car in front, put the arithmetic where it belongs. "There's still two races to go and it's really, really tight in the points," he said. "Everybody's within two or three positions to be honest." The car he and Ellis have now passed has led the class standings since the opening four races and has still never finished one of them first.