Patrick Long converted his second pole position of the 2016 Pirelli World Challenge season into his second victory of the season today, leading flag-to-flag in race one of the Canadian Tire Motorsport Park doubleheader. On the rolling start Long, in the No. 59 Wright Motorsports Porsche 911 GT3 R, took the lead into turn one with Andrew Palmer in the Bentley, and was able to pull an early one-second gap from P2. While Long led cleanly from flag to flag in GT, it was a game of pace between himself and the second place Palmer, as the two traded quick laps back and forth for the duration of the race, with the gap fluctuating between one and two seconds to the checkered flag.
“It’s ironic how things happen sometimes in the sporting world,” said Long. “From a points perspective, it was a strong day for Porsche and myself. It gives us a fighting spirit for the championship with those top three guys. It’s wild how racing works. You find the highs and lows linked together. It’s similar to Austin this year when we had a win and then in race two we ended up in the fence on lap one. The lesson to learn for me is to keep my head and focus as much as I can. From a wide prospective, you find out who you friends are at the toughest point. With Effort Racing taking a sabbatical for the rest of the year, it was a very quick turnaround to try and find a home. Fortunately, John Wright, Bobby Veggleoni and Michael Schien stepped up and said they had a space in the truck and we would like to have you in the team. I have worked with all of them over the past three seasons so it has been easy to get up to speed with them on a personality standpoint. I had to learn a different balance of a race car. We started out here on Thursday and we had a lot of work to do just to get the driver up to speed with how the car was setup.”
Race 2 of the CTMP weekend runs Sunday, May 22 at 3pm ET.