The No. 23 Valkyrie in traffic at Road Atlanta. It set the fastest race lap and led 23 laps on its way to fifth. Photo: Aston Martin
Aston Martin left Road Atlanta with a class win, a manufacturers’ runner-up spot and the fastest lap of the race. Only one of those belonged to the car the whole program is built around, and that lap didn’t come with a trophy.
The No. 23 Aston Martin THOR Team Valkyrie of Ross Gunn, Roman De Angelis and Alex Riberas finished fifth in GTP at Saturday’s Motul Petit Le Mans, 31.466 seconds behind the winning No. 6 Porsche Penske Motorsport 963 after 368 laps. The silverware came from GTD Pro instead, where Car Blanche, a YRB Racing-run Vantage GT3 making only its sixth IMSA start, won with Mattia Drudi, Marco Sørensen and Valentin Hasse Clot.
Same badge, same 10 hours, two very different afternoons. The difference wasn’t speed.
The stopwatch was on Aston’s side
The official timing sheets tell a story the finishing order hides. The Valkyrie’s 1:11.897 on lap 305 was the quickest lap anyone turned all day, ahead of the No. 93 Acura’s 1:11.949 and the race-winning Porsche’s best of 1:12.179. The No. 23 car led twice: six laps from lap 211, then 17 straight from lap 294 to 310 as the race ran into darkness. Ten different GTP cars spent time at the front on Saturday, and the Valkyrie’s 23 laps led put it squarely in that conversation.
One fast lap in a 10-hour race is a data point, not a verdict. It can fall on a light fuel load and fresh tires at exactly the right moment. But it does answer a basic question about the only car in GTP derived from a road-legal hypercar, a non-hybrid 6.5-liter V12 held to a 500kW (671bhp) cap: on Road Atlanta’s 2.54 miles, it wasn’t the car giving time away.
Race control had the last word
What cost the No. 23 car was the official race control log. It shows the Valkyrie was warned for incident responsibility with the No. 60 Acura near the five-hour mark, then handed two drive-through penalties: the first for contact with the No. 40 Wayne Taylor Racing Cadillac, ruled just after seven hours, and the second with roughly ten minutes to go.
That last one followed a Turn 1 incident with the No. 31 Whelen Cadillac at 9 hours, 41 minutes. The Whelen car went off course, the race’s final full-course yellow came out, and race control put responsibility on the Valkyrie. The No. 31 was classified 16th overall, 12 laps down. Jack Aitken had already wrapped up the GTP drivers’ title just by taking the start, so the championship didn’t swing on it, but the championship-winning car ended its year 12 laps down instead of fighting for a podium.
Aston Martin’s own account puts De Angelis as high as third before the late penalty dropped the car to fifth. Read the two together and the conclusion is uncomfortable but useful: the Valkyrie had the pace for the podium it took here a year ago. It lost that podium in the stewards’ office, not on the stopwatch.
Sixteen yellows, and why they punish the car in front
IMSA counted a record 16 full-course cautions, plus a red flag of nearly half an hour for nearby lightning. Add up the official flag analysis and the cautions alone ran for more than three and a half hours of a 10-hour race. Eight of them came in the last four hours.
That matters because of how IMSA restarts work. Race control’s messages walk through the routine every time: the pack-up, a pass-around, then a category split and class splits before green. Whatever gap a car built on track, or whatever fuel offset a team engineered by stopping early or late, gets compressed every time the yellow flies. Rivals who were a stop out of sequence get to pit while the field is slowed, which turns an expensive stop into a cheap one.
Aston Martin says that is exactly what happened: the Valkyrie led at several points in the final three hours, but badly timed cautions pulled it back into line on strategy with its rivals as the final hour began. THOR team principal Ian James had laid out the plan before the weekend, saying the key was “to make sure you’re on the lead lap when the sun goes down.” The team did that part. A caution-heavy finish then turned the race into a 60-minute sprint, and a sprint is where contact gets expensive.
The Aston that did win was the newest one
Car Blanche only joined IMSA at Watkins Glen in June. Petit Le Mans was its third GTD Pro race and its first Michelin Endurance Cup start in the class. Drudi qualified second, the team’s best IMSA grid spot. He moved into third with 40 minutes left, then passed two cars in a single move ten minutes later and defended to the flag, beating the No. 77 AO Racing Porsche of Harry King, Nick Tandy and Alessio Picariello by 1.507 seconds. The No. 1 Paul Miller Racing BMW finished third, which was plenty for Connor De Phillippi and Neil Verhagen to clinch the GTD Pro title.
It was Vantage’s first IMSA win of 2026 and Aston Martin’s third class win at Petit Le Mans, following the DBR9’s GT1 victory with Tomas Enge and Darren Turner in 2006 and the Heart of Racing Team’s 2021 GTD win with De Angelis, Gunn and Ian James. Two of the three drivers who won that 2021 race spent Saturday trying to do it in a hypercar.
Watch this team in 2027. Car Blanche steps up to GTD Pro full-time, and at Indianapolis it became the first confirmed entry for the 2027 season, with Sørensen and Hasse Clot. A customer team winning a 10-hour race on its first try in the class is the kind of result that makes manufacturer GT programs easier to sell.
THOR’s GTD title bid died before the green flag
The other half of Aston Martin’s weekend was harsher. The No. 27 Heart of Racing Team Vantage of Dudu Barrichello, Tom Gamble and Zach Robichon arrived third in the GTD standings and still mathematically alive. An electrical problem before the start ended that. The car completed just 37 laps, enough to secure third in the drivers’ standings for Barrichello in his first full IMSA season, while the No. 57 Winward Racing Mercedes-AMG won both the race and the title.
Aston Martin still finished as GTD manufacturers’ runner-up behind Mercedes-AMG, and THOR ended up third in the Michelin Endurance Cup, two points shy of the winners. Magnus Racing, back for the first time since Watkins Glen, brought its Vantage home fifth in GTD.
What the Valkyrie’s season actually says
Petit Le Mans makes it 15 top-ten finishes from 17 IMSA starts since the Valkyrie’s Sebring debut in 2025. Fifth equals its best of 2026, matching Road America, and the No. 23 car closes the year 11th in the GTP team standings. The pattern is a car that is now routinely there and rarely finishing it off.
Saturday sharpened that picture. The speed problem looks solved, at least at Road Atlanta. What’s left is execution in traffic over ten hours, and that is where the established LMDh teams, with years of IMSA experience, still have the edge. Aston Martin’s head of endurance motorsport Adam Carter said as much after the race, acknowledging there’s still work to do before the car can compete regularly against more experienced rivals.
The program now switches back to the World Endurance Championship, where the Valkyrie remains the only car racing in both series. If you missed it, here’s how Aston Martin’s weekend at the 6 Hours of Fuji played out. The GTP grid that greets the Valkyrie in 2027 will look different, too: Saturday’s sixth-place No. 60 was part of Acura’s final GTP race with the ARX-06, and the next wave of hypercar entries is already testing, as McLaren’s homologation push with Lando Norris shows.
For Aston Martin, the 2026 IMSA lesson is simple enough to fit on a pit board: the Valkyrie has the lap time, the Vantage has the trophies, and the hypercar has to stop paying drive-throughs.
About the Author
