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Barbosa/Fittipaldi Win Brickyard Grand Prix
- Updated: July 25, 2014
Joao Barbosa drove the Corvette to the win at Indianapolis. [Mark Walczak Photo]
The Brickyard Grand Prix was almost decided on a late race need for fuel – almost.
Prototype-class winners Joao Barbosa and Christian Fittipaldi drove their Action Express Racing Corvette DP to a convincing 48.964 sec. win Friday on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course, despite their crew’s concern that they were almost out of fuel.
The team, which started the two-hour, 45-minute race in fourth-place and led for the final 37 laps, chose to stretch their fuel supply as one Prototype team after another dove to the pits for a late race “splash-and-go”.
“I was worried at the end. We were trying to save fuel the whole time. We were able to stretch our early pit stops and stay out of trouble,” Barbosa noted. “The crew told me to keep doing what I was doing-save fuel.”
Scott Pruett (with Sage Karam and Memo Rojas) finished second for the third time in their Chip Ganassi-Ford EcoBoost/Riley after starting sixth; farther back than they would have liked.
“We didn’t qualify like we wanted. We got caught in the first turn mess but got back to the front about half-way through the race,” Indy 500 rookie driver Karam added. “I just found out four days ago that I’d be in the car after I got a call from Chip.”
Prototype Challenge winners Jack Hawksworth/Chris Cumming battled their teammates Bruno Junqueira and Duncan Ende for the class win late in the 108-lap endurance run, with 20th-place 500 rookie Hawksworth getting the better of the veteran 500 driver Junqueira.
“This was my first sports car race and first win in three tries here. I finally got a win here,” the Brit said somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
Cumming agreed and added that, “This 1-2 finish for both teams gives us momentum going into the next race at Road America next month.”
In the GTLM class, Jonathan Bomarito, who placed second here in 2012, drove his Dodge Viper SRT to a win and 14th-place over-all, as his partner Kuno Wittmer noted: “By keeping our nose clean.”
GTD class saw the Ferrari 458 Italia of Alessandro Balzan and Jeff Westphal finish ahead of an Audi R8 that the winners felt was faster than their mount.
“We ran the perfect race. The Audi was faster than we were but we stayed out of trouble and pushed hard,” Balzan said. “It was a hard day, but the Ferrari worked good.”
So, as darkness moved over the iconic track, and crews began to transform the road course back to its oval configuration, the podium celebration for the winners wound down as the champagne ran out and the lip-marked bricks cooled off.
“It’s just an unbelievable feeling, winning here for the first time in Indy and being able to kiss the bricks,” winner Barbosa beamed. “It’s just unbelievable what we did this weekend.”
Paul Gohde heard the sound of race cars early in his life.
Growing up in suburban Milwaukee, just north of Wisconsin State Fair Park in the 1950’s, Paul had no idea what “that noise” was all about that he heard several times a year. Finally, through prodding by friends of his parents, he was taken to several Thursday night modified stock car races on the old quarter-mile dirt track that was in the infield of the one-mile oval -and he was hooked.
The first Milwaukee Mile event that he attended was the 1959 Rex Mays Classic won by Johnny Thomson in the pink Racing Associates lay-down Offy built by the legendary Lujie Lesovsky. After the 100-miler Gohde got the winner’s autograph in the pits, something he couldn’t do when he saw Hank Aaron hit a home run at County Stadium, and, again, he was hooked.
Paul began attending the Indianapolis 500 in 1961, and saw A. J. Foyt’s first Indy win. He began covering races in 1965 for Racing Wheels newspaper in Vancouver, WA as a reporter/photographer and his first credentialed race was Jim Clark’s historic Indy win.Paul has also done reporting, columns and photography for Midwest Racing News since the mid-sixties, with the 1967 Hoosier 100 being his first big race to report for them.
He is a retired middle-grade teacher, an avid collector of vintage racing memorabilia, and a tour guide at Miller Park. Paul loves to explore abandoned race tracks both here and in Europe, with the Brooklands track in Weybridge England being his favorite. Married to Paula, they have three adult children and two cats.
Paul loves the diversity of all types of racing, “a factor that got me hooked in the first place.”