It was a race of surprises, but one of the biggest in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring on Saturday was the win by the privateer No. 79 WeatherTech-sponsored Porsche RSR-19 in the GT Le Mans class, where every other entry was fully backed by the factory.
Yes, it was a small class, but the WeatherTech Porsche victory was no less significant. Porsche formally pulled out of the class last year in preparation for entering the Le Mans Daytona hybrid, or LMDh Prototype class in 2023, but still managed to take two victories at Sebring – the Le Mans class with the WeatherTech Porsche, and the GT Daytona win with the No. 9 Pfaff Porsche.
During the off-season, with only a few weeks before the season started in January with the Rolex 24 at Daytona, team principal Cooper MacNeil, son of the founder of the auto accessory firm WeatherTech, decided to abandon his usual entry in the more amateur-friendly GT Daytona class, and go for it in the all-pro GT Le Mans class. There are rules that prohibit all-pro teams in GT Daytona, so the chance for a amateur driver like MacNeil to podium is greater. There are no rules that prohibit “Bronze” or “Silver” drivers in GT Le Mans, but given the level of competition, all the drivers are typically “Gold” or “Platinum.”
In addition to that GT Le Mans teams generally have full factory backing, picking up the tab for all expenses.
MacNeil acquired a Porsche from an overseas team, Proton, and hired a pair of pro drivers, Matt Campbell and Mathieu Jaminet. Jaminet was driving late in the race with the first and second-place cars, a Corvette C8.R driven by Antonio Garcia and a BMW M8 GTE driven by Connor De Phillippi, lightly collided, allowing the Porsche to squeeze by. Jaminet kept the BMW at bay for the final eight minutes.
Luck? Sure. But MacNeil has lost races with bad luck, and he’ll take the victories when they come. He won Sebring in 2013, in the GT Le Mans class, also in a Porsche.
“I'm thrilled for the whole team, for the brand,” MacNeil said. “My second race in GTLM ever, to get the win, especially at Sebring against some of the best drivers in the world, against the top manufacturers’ factory-backed efforts. We show up with a non-factory effort and a Silver driver in the car – I could not be more thrilled to get the win.”
As you’d expect, going GT Le Mans required stepping up the spending as well as the performance. “The car is more expensive, the parts are more expensive, the running costs are more expensive, but we’re not her counting numbers are far as the bills go, we’re here to win races and bring forward the best effort that we can,” MacNeil told Autoweek.com. “And we’re more than thrilled to get this win. It’s more than worth the cost, let me put it that way.
“Whether here or at the factory back in Chicago, we always thrive for the top step, so we thought why not put ourselves up against some of the top teams and drivers in the world to test our hand against it? That way we can showcase what the team, what the car, what the brand does and can do by taking the battle literally to the front step of General Motors and BMW.”
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Factory Teams No Match for Privateer Porsche at Mobile 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring - Autoweek
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