Corvette Racing by Pratt Miller Motorsports has had a habit of winning top GT class championships for the better part of the last 25 years; 15 of them in fact, from 2001 through 2021.

But Corvette Racing was coming up on four years without a championship as the 2025 checkered flag neared, and the last time that happened was due to a mid-year class switch. Corvette debuted a new GT2 specification car halfway through 2009 for the class that eventually became GT Le Mans in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.

You could say order was restored in the galaxy with Corvette Racing back on top of the Grand Touring Daytona Pro (GTD PRO) class for the first time in this new class’ history this year (it debuted in 2022), courtesy of a consistent championship-level performance from Antonio Garcia and Alexander Sims in the No. 3 Corvette Z06 GT3.R.

Not without a major fight, though, from plucky DragonSpeed in its first year in the category. Elton Julian’s group fielded its No. 81 Ferrari 296 GT3 with Albert Costa and a rotation of co-drivers and battled to the last race before everything that could go wrong in a year largely absent of issues did go wrong in the final 10-hour race at Motul Petit Le Mans.

Garcia and Sims built a solid start to the campaign with four podium finishes from the first five races through the Sahlen’s Six Hours of The Glen at Watkins Glen International.
At the halfway point of the year, the pair had a 52-point lead over defending GTD PRO champion Laurin Heinrich and new co-driver Klaus Bachler in the No. 77 AO Racing Porsche 911 GT3 R, Costa 114 points behind in third in the DragonSpeed Ferrari, Mike Rockenfeller and Sebastian Priaulx fourth and 115 back in the No. 64 Ford Multimatic Motorsports Ford Mustang GT3 and Dan Harper and Max Hesse fifth and 122 back in the No. 48 Paul Miller Racing BMW M4 GT3 EVO.

Five teams and five manufacturers in the top five through five races? That’s IMSA GTD PRO competition and racing in a nutshell.
What Garcia and Sims didn’t have that all their rivals did through Round 7, the Motul IMSA SportsCar Grand Prix at Road America, was a race win.
The narrative was building whether Garcia could repeat what he and Jan Magnussen did in 2018: win a championship without winning a race. A win was needed to keep their title momentum push alive.

Perhaps fittingly, that elusive first win of the season came at the WeatherTech Championship’s annual GT-only showcase race, the Michelin GT Challenge at VIRginia International Raceway. Finishing ahead of DragonSpeed there, where Giacomo Altoe qualified on pole and handed off to Costa, singularly kept Corvette’s pair ahead in the standings. Garcia and Sims led Costa by 53 points, leaving VIR.
Had the order been reversed, Costa would have held a seven-point lead heading to the final two events.

DragonSpeed kept the pressure on with second at Indianapolis to Garcia and Sims’ fourth, which closed the gap to 18 points. But at Motul Petit Le Mans, Garcia, Sims and third driver Daniel Juncadella finished third while after a couple penalties and delays, DragonSpeed ended seventh with Costa, Altoe and Davide Rigon. A final 73-point margin in the championship didn’t fully illustrate how close the battle was.

Garcia captured his sixth sports car title, and fifth in the 12 years of a unified WeatherTech Championship dating to 2014. As one of the few drivers who’s been in the same car and car number (a No. 3 Corvette, albeit different generations) through that time, Garcia hailed the overall continuity and consistency for the continued championship success.

“I think it’s consistency,” he explained. “Not only the year consistency, but also keeping the key elements of the team as long as you can, basically. So, if you go around the whole Corvette crew and members, there are quite a few that have been there for a long time. When that happens, everything runs very, very smooth.
Obviously, you are taking new members once in a while for sure. You need to keep the ball rolling, but I think that consistency and be loyal to every single member of the team, that’s what it takes, because I think it’s a real family.”

Garcia also made a rare admission of being “nervous” ahead of the race in knowing he felt everything had to be “perfect” to win the title.
Sims, whose dry, biting wit and sense of humor was on display multiple times over the Motul Petit Le Mans weekend, adds a GTD PRO title to his 2023 Grand Touring Prototype (GTP) title.

“When a fourth or a third was the best possible result we could get, then that’s what we got,” Sims said. “Then, yeah, with a second or a first, like at Virginia, was possible, then we were able to get that. Consistency was executed super well throughout the year. We’ve had to be on our absolute A-game throughout the year thanks to the great competitors that we’ve got in GTD PRO.
For a while, it seemed to be the 77 that was going to run us closest, and then the 81 sort of started to come strong midseason with their results and once we finished through until this weekend really, really strongly.”

Chevrolet adds an important GTD PRO manufacturers’ championship, its 40th in IMSA and eighth in the modern era since 2014, alongside Sims and Garcia’s driver and Corvette Racing by Pratt Miller’s team titles. It’s the first for new Corvette Racing program manager Jessica Dane in her first full season in the role.

“The stats are fairly phenomenal, and for me I came onto this program literally a year ago, and understanding the depth and the history of Chevrolet in motorsport, Corvette in motorsport, it’s something in the grand scheme of things, I’m a tiny blip on that radar,” she reflected.
DragonSpeed can hold its heads high after its valiant effort. Costa and Altoe won from last at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park on a strategy special and established itself as a weekly contender racing alongside its technical partner Risi Competizione.

Ford’s Priaulx and Rockenfeller also impressed, winning key races for the brand in Detroit and Indianapolis, en route to third in the championship. The new pairing of one of sports car’s most experienced drivers in “Rocky” and one of its up-and-coming young stars in “Sebby” was clearly a good one.
Harper and Hesse’s late-season charge propelled them to fourth, with Heinrich and Bachler fifth after persevering through adversity from Detroit onwards.
Of the 10 full-season GTD PRO cars, nine scored at least one podium finish and five of the seven full-season manufacturers entered won at least one race.
Occasionally, the competitive and fierce nature of the class ran overboard with too much contact. But Sims hailed the updated driving standards as the season ran to its championship conclusion.

“It’s been a lot of fun, close racing,” he said. “I would like to just give credit to IMSA, the championship, and the stance that they’ve taken.
“Honestly, I’m a big supporter of the way that they had to react, I think, to some of the slightly dodgy situations that were presented to them at Road America. It’s kept the racing clean and really, really fair.”