ACI Motorsports returns to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course for the Pirelli GT4 America finale. Photo: ACI Motorsports
Most teams arrive at a season finale with one story to tell. ACI Motorsports is arriving at Indianapolis Motor Speedway with four cars, two manufacturers, a long-shot championship bid, a fresh win to protect and a press conference on the Friday schedule. Pick any thread you like. The weekend has more than one.
The Chattanooga-based team enters four cars in the Pirelli GT4 America finale: two Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS Clubsports and two BMW M4 GT4 Evos. There are two 60-minute races, Saturday, October 10 at 10 a.m. EDT and Sunday, October 11 at 10:25 a.m. EDT, both on the road course, and both streamed on the SRO YouTube channel. All three class titles are still undecided, so the finale is a proper one.
The win that arrived one race late
ACI’s No. 7 Cayman, shared by Yves Baltas and Trenton Estep, took the overall and Silver-class win at Barber by 2.119 seconds. It was ACI’s first overall victory of the 2026 Pirelli GT4 America season and the first GT4 win for both drivers. It was also a pairing that had only just been put together.
Read the race, though, and it is more a survival story than a pace story. Baltas and Estep ran in the lead pack all afternoon, and Estep inherited the lead when the two cars ahead tangled less than two laps from the end. By Estep’s account, a yellow flag also helped their track position and let the tires cool before the fight came. That is how a 60-minute sprint tends to work: with no long stints to separate the field, track position in the last ten minutes is worth more than the lap time you set in the first ten. It is also the same car that won Barber outright in 2025 with Riley Dickinson and Curt Swearingin, so the car and crew have form at this track.
At Indianapolis the trick is to prove it was not just the tangle. Overall wins in this series also sit on top of the class structure, where Silver, Pro-Am and Am run together on track, a layout we have explained in our primer on how multi-class racing works. A class win and an overall win are not the same achievement, and ACI now wants more of the second kind.
The Garcia brothers’ arithmetic
The real championship story in the ACI garage belongs to Michael and Alex Garcia in the No. 21 car. They sit third in the Am standings, 14 points behind the leader, with only these two races left. Their BMW M4 GT4 Evo was close to a total loss after a heavy crash in the second 60-minute race at Road America in August, and the team rebuilt it. In the meantime, the brothers borrowed a Porsche at Barber, won Friday’s Am race and finished second in class on Saturday.
A 14-point deficit with two races to go is not hopeless, but it needs help. The series’ own finale preview describes the top of the Am table as separated by a single point, so the Garcias need to beat two rivals who are fighting each other, and then hope one of them has a bad hour. Our look at Road America makes the case: when Frankie Muniz took his first pro win there, GT4 America’s Am class rewarded survival over speed. Finishing is half the title. The other half is being there when the leaders are not.
The repair itself deserves a note. Rebuilding a car between rounds, with weeks to work, is a different problem from the in-race fixes we described in our look at how endurance teams handle major mechanical repairs mid-race, but it takes the same discipline. A shop that can bring a near-write-off back for a title run has a lot of depth.
Two brands, one garage
ACI’s lineup also has a quiet effect on the manufacturer table. The series lists the Global GT4 Manufacturer Championship with BMW at 1,399 points, Toyota at 1,170 and Porsche at 1,149. BMW’s lead looks safe, which makes the live question second place: Porsche is 21 points behind Toyota, and ACI’s Cayman and M4 entries add to different sides of that ledger. If manufacturer points are credited by make, as the table implies, the team is feeding both of the brands that matter most here.
Porsche already has Balance of Performance on its mind this year, as in our look at Porsche Penske’s BoP complaint. A GT4 team that runs both marques is one of the few places in the paddock where the comparison happens in one garage, with one set of mechanics and one set of data.
The announcement nobody has described
At 1:15 p.m. EDT on Friday, team owner Curt Swearingin and colleagues will announce what ACI calls a major part of its 2027 SRO program, in the IMS media center. The team has not said what it is, so treat any specific guess as a guess. What can be said is that ACI already runs Porsche Carrera Cup North America, GT4 America and GT America powered by AWS, and that it says its September Carrera Cup visit to the same road course produced four wins and two overall runner-up finishes. When a team that busy announces something for 2027, the useful questions are simple: which cars, which series, which drivers, and how many of each. Listen for those answers before the adjectives.
What to watch
Start with the No. 25 Cayman of Damir Hot and Porsche Motorsport North America Selected Driver Ryan Yardley, who have Pro-Am podiums at Circuit of the Americas and Road America this year and finished a recovering ninth at Barber after contact and a puncture. Yardley says Hot has not driven the track in over 12 months, so practice is the key session. Then check the No. 10 BMW of Muzaffar Gafurov and Ross Poole, who were fourth in Friday’s Barber race, their best result of the season. Finally, see whether Baltas and Estep can turn one lucky Saturday into a habit.
Official practice starts Thursday afternoon at 3:35 p.m. EDT. The title answers come over the following two mornings.
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