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Jan Magnussen Hopes To Break Ford GT’s Four-Race IMSA Streak At VIR

Corvette Racing’s Jan Magnussen wrote a column for Motorsport recently in which he discussed the importance of breaking Ford Chip Ganassi Racing’s winning streak in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship GTLM class. In each of the last races in the series, a Ford GT has come away with the win, and as a result, the No. 67 Ford GT team now leads Magnussen and Antonio Garcia in the No. 3 Chevrolet Corvette C7.R in the championship standings, with the No. 66 Ford GT not far behind in third.

Ford isn’t invulnerable, though; the No. 67 Ford GTLM car leads by just a four-point margin, which could be overturned by a first-place result for the No. 3 Corvette. What’s more, next up on the WeatherTech calendar is the Michelin GT Challenge at Virginia International Raceway, and as Magnussen notes in his column: “VIR has been a happy hunting ground for Antonio and me over the past two years; we have won back-to-back Michelin GT Challenge events.”

Two years ago I qualified on pole, and we pretty much led all the way to the checkered flag,” Jan Magnussen writes. “Last year it was a hell of a fight. We only qualified sixth but pulled off a great race to take the win.”

The 45-year-old Danish racing driver chalks his and Garcia’s success at VIR in 2017 up to “not making any mistakes,” saying that while other teams had contact or veered off-track, he and his teammate capitalized to pull off a win.

Of course, Magnussen notes that it’s not just Ford that Corvette Racing has to fear. “The competition in GTLM continues to get more and more intense,” he says. “BMW showed improved pace at Road America, and you can never count out those Porsche guys either.” But those teams are further down in the championship standings, making them less of a threat as Corvette goes about trying to capture its third consecutive team and manufacturer titles in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.

Ideally, he writes, Corvette will go 1-2, with BMW and Porsche coming in between the Corvettes and the Ford GTs. Realistically, that’s probably not about to happen.

Aaron Brzozowski is a writer and motoring enthusiast from Detroit with an affinity for '80s German steel. He is not active on the Twitter these days, but you may send him a courier pigeon.

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