NBC Sports will preview the 2025 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season finale, Motul Petit Le Mans, with a special one-hour show on Sunday, Oct. 5 at 3 p.m. ET on NBC and Peacock.

The network show will air the Sunday before Motul Petit Le Mans, which kicks off live on network NBC at noon ET on Saturday, Oct. 11.
Peacock will stream the full race flag-to-flag (in the U.S.) with additional streaming via IMSA.TV and IMSA’s Official YouTube channel (internationally).
The top-level, factory-supported production car-based class in American sports car racing has evolved through several names and technical specifications over the last 15 years. But there’s been one constant:

Corvette drivers Antonio Garcia and Alexander Sims will be fighting to win the GTD-Pro championship in this last IMSA race of 2025 season

Since the 45-year-old Spaniard joined Corvette Racing by Pratt Miller Motorsports in 2009, he has excelled in every iteration of the premier GT category, through half a dozen technical regulation changes and three generations of Corvettes.

Garcia won his first championship in the GT class of the American Le Mans Series in 2013 with co-driver Jan Magnussen, the final year before ALMS and IMSA’s TUDOR United SportsCar Championship merged to create the modern-day IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. Teamed with Magnussen from 2014-’19, Garcia won a pair of IMSA Grand Touring Le Mans (GTLM) titles for Corvette Racing in 2017 and ’18 and added two more teamed with Jordan Taylor in 2020 and ’21.

Garcia has collected a total of 31 IMSA race wins along with his quintet of championships, including five wins since the most recent GT category realignment that created the Grand Touring Daytona Pro (GTD PRO) class in 2022.
But whether with Taylor in ’22 and ’23 or his current co-driver Alexander Sims, Garcia has never achieved a GTD PRO championship.

That could change October 11 at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta. Sims and Garcia and the No. 3 Corvette Z06 GT3.R will carry a slim 18-point advantage into the season-concluding Motul Petit Le Mans over Albert Costa, who has shared DragonSpeed’s No. 81 Ferrari 296 GT3 for the majority of the year with Giacomo Altoè and endurance driver Davide Rigon. Mike Rockenfeller and Sebastian Priaulx sit third, 169 points back in the No. 64 Ford Multimatic Motorsports Ford Mustang GT3, with an outside shot.

Given his record, it’s surprising that Garcia has not won a championship to date during the GTD PRO era. What’s even more remarkable is that while Corvette Racing owns eight victories at Motul Petit Le Mans, Garcia has never tasted the champagne in Georgia a measure of how challenging and unpredictable the 10-hour day-into-night endurance classic can be.

Sims and Garcia achieved their only win of the ’25 season at VIRginia International Raceway with an aggressive undercut pit stop strategy from the Corvette by Pratt Miller team that vaulted them to the front of the field.
At that point, they led Costa by 53 points, but the fellow-Spaniard cut the margin to 18 by finishing second ahead of the No. 3 Corvette in fourth at the most recent WeatherTech Championship race at Indianapolis.

“The last few races we’ve been always trying to cover different strategies coming from especially the No. 77 (the defending GTD PRO class champion AO Racing Porsche that lies fourth in this year’s standings) or the No. 81 (Costa),” Garcia said. “When people are probably not feeling very competitive or are not in contention at some point, that’s when they roll the dice and they kind of put everybody under the pressure.

“So, I think we really need to be very prepared on that before the races knowing what to do and how to react to people,” he continued. “Maybe there’s something we can do, like we did at VIR, be the first one to really make the move. You play it out from there and still go for the win.”

Garcia noted that fighting for a championship has become more difficult since IMSA aligned its GT classes to the worldwide FIA GT3 specification in 2022, mostly eliminating the performance disparity that existed between GTD class cars and slightly faster GTLM entries. GTD and GTD PRO now also use a standardized Michelin tire, whereas in the GTLM era, manufacturers worked with Michelin to develop tires for their specific car.

Corvette Racing had been a pure factory program since the early 2000s.
However, the shift in regulations required Chevrolet and Pratt Miller Motorsports to create the first-ever Corvette GT3.R for customer sales. Ford Racing quickly followed suit with a GT3 version of the Mustang.

“GT1, GT2, GT Le Mans…they were really cool cars to drive, and we had a lot of fun with those cars during those years,” recalled Garcia. “The transition to GT3 was a little bit difficult, or different, because we had a transition year with a bit of a mix until the Z06 GT3.R was able to race.
But I don’t see many, many differences, because there is always a superb level of drivers and good teams you’re fighting against.

“This is my 16th year with the team, and the approach has always been the same,” he added. “The Corvette Racing mentality has always been the same and the approach to every single race or championship has been the same regardless of the actual class of car we were running. This is just another year we are very happy and proud that we are in contention.”

Driving for IMSA’s most established and successful GT-class team, the No. 3 Corvette pairing has the championship-tested mettle going into Motul Petit Le Mans over Costa and the DragonSpeed Ferrari, which are in their first full season of GTD PRO competition. Chevrolet leads Ferrari by 46 points in the GTD PRO Manufacturer’s championship.

“The last two years, we came up short, but we are looking forward to showing and use all the knowledge we have to be in this position,” Garcia said. “Let’s see if we have enough of everything pace, race strategy, and I would say a little bit of luck.
“Let’s hope everything falls in the right direction, and we can come up with another championship.”