BOWMANVILLE, Ontario, Canada (14 July 2024) –Sean Creech Motorsport finished 10th overall in Sunday’s Chevrolet Grand Prix at Canadian Tire Motorsports Park with drivers Lance Willsey and Joao Barbosa. The two hour, forty-minute race marked the fourth round of the 2024 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar LMP2 class Championship as the series traveled north of the border to take on the 2.45-circuit staged 70 miles East of Toronto.
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Carrying a distinctive livery on the No. 33 Focal One Ligier JS P217 that proudly carried the Canadian flag in homage to a remarkable family story, Willsey had a clean start to the three-class race as the LMP2 category featured in the IMSA sprint event. Starting in 12th, Willsey had moved up to tenth just 20 minutes in as the team made a bold call to pit early to top off on fuel. The move had Willsey fueled up to race all the way through his Bronze driver time and would have allowed the No. 33 entry to leapfrog the other runners later in the race.
But the advantage was lost when a full course caution was called just moments later, allowing all the teams to pit and adapt to the Creech strategy.
Willsey put his head down on the restart and was able to move back up, vacillating between 8th and 9th position before turning the car over to Barbosa with an hour and forty minutes left to go.
Rejoining the fray 26th overall, Barbosa was able to make up ground as he moved back up to the top ten with an hour and twenty minutes elapsed. With the team making some final tweaks to the car on the final pit stop, Barbosa returned in 11th but was able to move up and cross the line 10th at the finish.
“We struggled for pace this weekend, it was sort of ‘two steps forward, one step back’ with the car,” said Willsey. “But the crew worked very hard as always, and we kept chipping away at it over the course of the weekend, but we never got it in the zone. But the racing here is nothing less than spectacular. The crowds are great and it’s a wonderful, wonderful place to come and spend the weekend. The track is short and incredibly fast and is one of the busier tracks that we go to, particularly with the multiclass racing. But even though I’ve never done especially well here, it remains one of my favorite places to come to and favorite tracks.”
“The team tried some out-of-the-box thinking with the strategy that I think would have been really really good, but then we had that yellow, so it didn’t work out!” sighed Barbosa. “It was definitely a learning weekend for us. We had challenges with the car but on the final restart, it just kind of came alive and gave me a lot more confidence which is so important here. So we will have to just go back and look at that. We knew it was going to be a hard race for us but the team did everything well this weekend and executed great stops and strategy in the race, so we’ll take the positives and look forward to the next race at Road America.”
SCM thanks partner Focal One for its continued support.
Next up for SCM and the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship is the IMSA SportsCar Weekend at “America’s National Park of Speed,” Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wis., August 2-4. The race will be broadcast live in the U.S. on Peacock, with an encore broadcast later in the evening on CNBC. International viewers can watch via IMSA.tv, with IMSA Radio also available at IMSA.com.
About SCM
Team leader Sean Creech has competed in a multitude of sports car series from 1990 until the present day, including Group C, IMSA GTP, WSC, Grand-Am, SRO World Challenge, and IMSA. SCM will contest the full WeatherTech SportsCar Championship in 2024 with João Barbosa and Lance Willsey. http://seancreechmotorsport.com/
About Focal One
One in eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during their lifetime in the United States. The Focal One® HIFU Prostate treatment offers patients a non-invasive outpatient procedure to target prostate tissue while avoiding the common side effects such as loss of urinary continence and sexual function. The Focal One treatment uses high-performance, high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) to precisely target and ablate the prostate, allowing patients to quickly return to normal activities. http://www.focalone.com/
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