For the second successive year BMW Rahal Letterman were the victorious GT team at Road America. The no.90 M3 GT of Joey Hand and Dirk Muller won the two-hour, 45-minute race the pair completing 66 laps of the four-mile Elkhart Lake track.
The win was the New Jersey based team's first victory of the year, but the result was enough to bump BMW into a six-point lead at the top of the hotly contested manufacturers' points table. Hand and Muller also improved their standings in the drivers' standings, moving into a tie for second place.
“I'll take it,” said Hand. “We love to win. This is the second year in a row for me and I think the timing is perfect. We came in here to win, Dirk and I came here to push, push, push. I got in the car for the race and I wanted to show these guys that I wanted to win just as bad as everybody else did.”
“It was such an easy one I tell you,” Muller joked alongside his teammate. “It was tough to race. I hurt everything in the car, everything was vibrating. The car was talking to me every lap but we made it.”
The second BMW – the No.92 of Tomm y Milner and Bill Auberlen – had a less auspicious visit to Wisconsin. Just 20 minutes into the race Auberlen found himself behind a slowing LMPC class car through The Kink. The BMW was hit from behind sending it into the wall in a high speed crash which the team say inflicted terminal damage on the chassis, though Auberlen was uninjured in the incident.
By the time Muller crossed the finish line half the team had already began the journey back to team's factory to start work on building a replacement chassis in time for the following round at Mosport in Ontario, the calendar giving the team less than week before testing begins at the trank on August 27.
“Since we've been so close on a number of occasions to finally get it done is very important,” said Bobby Rahal – team principal – about the win. “It's important for us in the manufacturers' championship – it gives us a little bit of breathing room – but it's so competitive out there that now we have to go to Mosport and last year we weren't very good there.”
