Tough End to Promising Petit Le Mans for Peregrine Racing
Braselton, Georgia. (Oct. 3, 2022) - Peregrine Racing entered the 25th running of Petit Le Mans, the season finale for the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, focused on closing out 2022 with a peak result. Peregrine Racing rolled off the transporters full of speed, as both entries in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge earned their best qualifying efforts of the season to start second in their respective classes of competition.
The weekend looked promising for Peregrine Racing’s No. 39 Lamborghini Huracán GT3 EVO. Robert Megennis drove to the limit in qualifying to achieve the team’s highest starting position to date, putting the car on the front row of the GTD class for the 25th running of Petit Le Mans. As the green flag flew, there was no lack of action and Megennis held the third position in the GTD class, running the fastest lap of the race during the early stages. Unfortunately, the No. 39 rolled to a stop at the top of Turn 2 only 32 minutes into the race, bringing out the first caution. The car was towed back to the garage area where the team got to work, discovering an underlying electrical chassis harness issue that affected the throttle potentiometer - a problem which ultimately ended the day for the Peregrine Racing crew.
“Our result in Petit Le Mans is super disappointing,” said team co-owner Mark Siegel. “I’m really proud of the team. They worked incredibly hard to prep and set up the car during practice, and clearly we had one of the fastest cars in the GTD field. We had the fastest GTD lap for the first five hours of the race despite only running thirty minutes, so it was setting up to be a great day for us. Ultimately, we had an electrical failure and as far as I can tell, it was probably a ten-dollar part that compromised our race. This was no one’s fault. It’s just one of those things that happens, and it’s incredibly unfortunate that it happened half an hour into a ten-hour race instead of during a practice session, but that is racing. That’s why it’s so rewarding when everything goes right and you win. I feel really disappointed for the drivers, the team, and the crew. To have this be the way we end our season is really disappointing.”
In the 2022 IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge, the No. 93 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS Clubsport was piloted by the all-pro pairing of Tyler McQuarrie and Tom Dyer for the first time this season. After an impressive qualifying effort to earn the team’s best starting position of the season, Dyer made a stellar move around fellow GS competitor Dylan Machavern to take the lead in the opening stages of the Fox Factory 120. Dyer went on to lead the field for 30 laps in the two-hour finale. As the final race of the season continued, the Peregrine Racing CarBahn Motorsports team began to lack grip and struggled to maintain their position in the top five. McQuarrie took the wheel of the No. 93 after 45 minutes to finish out the event. Like Dyer had experienced, McQuarrie battled a struggling Porsche and brought home a ninth-place result for the team.
"It was actually looking like a really good weekend," remarked Siegel. "Tom had one lap to qualify and put it P2. It seemed like we had a really good car. There was a slight bit of contact in Tom’s stint, and we don’t know if that impacted the car, but the performance just seemed to fall off as the race went on. Eventually, Tyler slipped back to ninth, which is obviously not what we were hoping for, and we’re still actually trying to figure out what happened. It was just unfortunate, but it seemed like maybe it wasn’t the race for any of the Porsches. I was super impressed with how the team developed the car throughout the weekend. In fact, we did not start out terribly fast when we got here on Thursday, so to have engineered the car and gotten it set up to where we could put in a P2 qualifying lap is a great achievement by our crew, and hats off to them.”
As the 2022 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship comes to a close, Peregrine Racing can note many positive moments throughout the season. The team captured three podiums in the Sprint Cup, highlighted by a second place finish at their home race of Laguna Seca.
“High highs and low lows: that’s racing,” Siegel said when recounting the 2022 campaign. “This year, I feel like we’ve had more than our fair share of bad luck, but there are just seasons like that. I don’t think there’s anything the CarBahn crew could’ve done to give us better potential this year, so it’s no reflection on our team. I think we’ve got an amazing group of engineers and crew, and I think our chances are really great next year. This has just been one of those seasons, and all you can do is just bounce back and try again.”
All sights are now set on the 2023 season, kicking off with the Roar Before the 24 and the Rolex 24 Hours of DAYTONA on January 20-29th, 2023. Follow Peregrine’s official social media channels for updates about the offseason and 2023 preparations.
INSIGHT FROM THE GTD COCKPIT:
Robert Megennis
"We had a great start to the race. We kind of got held up at the beginning, but we had one of the fastest cars out there, and we were faster than a bunch of the pro cars. We were absolutely flying our way through the field and getting up towards the front, when 30 or 40 minutes into the race, a six inch piece of wiring harness failed, and that's pretty much it. It’s so disappointing. The team’s done such an amazing job. This car was great. Everything was good to go, there are just these little things that we can't control and that's how racing goes.
It hurts a lot to end the year like this, but we'll just have to go win next year. We gave our all from start to finish. There were lots of ups and lots of downs, but we maximized everything we had every time we showed up at the racetrack, and that's all you can do as a team. This year it didn't work out, but I know that we are so fast now and we're going to start next year strong. I'm super proud of these Peregrine CarBahn guys, because no one works as hard as they do. It's been awesome start to finish."
Jeff Westphal
"That was not the Petit that we wanted to cap off our first full season in the IMSA Weathertech Championship. We had a fast car because we were running at the front of the entire GT field. But this weekend it was the ten-dollar part which ultimately ruined the day. There was an electrical harness failure, which created a lack of throttle actuation from the pedal to the engine. We couldn't request throttle even if we wanted it; our foot was on the floor and nothing was happening. The team was able to identify and fix the problem, but by that time we were many, many laps down.
The risk heading back out posed to us and others was that if the issue came back, we risked getting rear ended and having an even bigger crash. The scope of that liability for us and others on track didn’t justify heading back out to finish at the bottom of the pack.
I'm really proud of the team this year for coming together and making us competitive racecars in our first year with the Lamborghini. We've been quite fast at a lot of the races this year, some of which were podium finishes and some were riddled with bad luck. Based on the time and energy everyone has contributed I know this result is a hard pill to swallow.
Frankly, we've had really terrible luck at all the endurance races this year. We were a pinball at Daytona. In Sebring, we found a lone plastic bag that overheated the car in half a lap. At Watkins Glen, two prototypes were hitting each other and sent me into the fence at 130 mph and totaling our car. And now a small electrical harness takes us out of podium contention in the first 30 minutes of a 10-hour race. I hope we have had two to three years of bad luck all in one season because the entire Carbahn with Peregrine Racing team deserves better.
2023 cannot come soon enough!"
Corey Lewis
"I think overall, obviously mechanical failures happen and that's something that's out of everyone's control. You can't predict it, right? It's not for a lack of prep or anything like that, so you can't even go down that road. Everyone here at CarBahn Peregrine Racing gave us a top-notch program, a top-notch car, and we really worked on the car throughout the weekend. We were trying to predict the weather and trying to balance the setup because of that, and ultimately it was a beautiful day to go racing. It was just unlucky with the mechanical failure. Rob did an awesome opening stint to start working his way up through the field. We were the fastest car, so we definitely had the pace to work with, and I was really looking forward to my time in the car. I was coming up next, but you know these things happen.
It’s not the way you want to end the season. Throughout the endurance rounds we were just plagued with bad luck. I don't know if it was me bringing some bad juju over here or what, but the endurance season been tough for us. We’ve always had fast race cars but we've just always been on the wrong side of Lady Luck. I want to say a massive thank you to the whole team. I love driving for this group, and who knows what the future may hold, but I can’t thank them enough."
INSIGHT FROM THE IMPC COCKPIT:
Tyler McQuarrie
"This weekend we had our best starting position all year, and Tom had an amazing start. He got up to the lead on the first corner and was able to stay there for pretty much a lot of his stint. He fell back to second before his pitstop, but still ran really strong. I hopped in the car and it felt pretty good, but then it just fell off really fast and I struggled for grip the whole time. In the closing stint, we were trying to run a lot harder and I thought we’d be able to maintain the race pace, but it wasn’t the case. The one thing we can hang our hat on is that we were the highest-finishing Porsche today, so that was good. It’s something that you always need to look at, so I think we need to focus on the positives, but at the end of the day it was definitely not the result we were hoping for with where we started. So, it’s disappointing, but I’m looking forward to working on the car and getting it better.
Every season you look back and there are peaks and valleys, and I think this season there were a lot of valleys. The whole team, the crew, we had some banged up cars and the guys worked so hard. The best thing you can do for them is to give them good results and we just haven’t been able to piece it all together, but I think it’s no one’s fault or lack of effort. I think we need to focus on the car and get it better in the offseason. I think it’s something we haven’t been able to do this season with everything that’s gone on, so I think that will be our main goal this offseason."
Tom Dyer
"Overall, it was great to be able to be here and race with Tyler and the team and represent everyone. We had a good start and a good opening stint, and I think what we found this weekend is that we need to go back and work on refining the car a little more. It was good, it was quick, but I don’t think we had the long run pace we needed to sustain a top-five finish. Tyler drove his heart out. He did the best he could, but he and I both experienced a lack of grip towards the end of the stint. I think we just came up a little bit short, but if there’s one thing that this team is amazing at doing, it’s figuring things out, making the improvements, and coming back stronger at subsequent events. That’s what we’re going to do next year, and I look forward to it. It’s still a new car for us. Even though we’ve been running it all season, we haven’t had a ton of time to do a lot of testing and development, so that’s on the docket this offseason. I think you’ll see the car at the front like you’re used to seeing from start to finish next year.
In the three races that I drove in, I think it was kind of similar to the way this weekend went. We had flashes and showed well, but we just couldn’t capitalize on it. Those are the things we’ll look at and review this offseason, and decide how to be able to stay strong from the beginning to the end, and execute on that as opposed to just hanging on. Racing is a tough one. Everyone here is going through peaks and valleys, and it’s not anything that we haven’t seen or done before. Right now, we’re a single-car team. In the past, we were a two-car team, which was great because we could feed off of each other. Like I said, we really haven’t been able to get too deep into developing and evolving this car, where with our previous car it was like a glove where we knew exactly what to do and how to get the best out of it because we were with it for so long. With this one, we’re still testing and tuning and still trying to figure it out a little bit. I think we were the highest-finishing Porsche, which is great for the team even though it’s not inside the top five like we were hoping for. I guess that’s a small consolation, but we do come here to win and no one’s going to be satisfied until we get there."
