It was a case of the perfect track for the perfect car Saturday at Lime Rock Park as the Porsche GT Team turned the marque’s 450th North American pole position into the first international win for the new mid-engine Porsche 911 RSR. Patrick Pilet and Dirk Werner took the victory in the No. 911 Porsche ahead of teammates Laurens Vanthoor and Gimmi Bruni in the No. 912 to complete a 1-2 for the CORE autosport-led program.

Adding to the German brand’s mastery of the tiny bullring circuit, Park Place Motorsports won GT Daytona in the No. 73 Porsche 911 GT3 R with sports car ace Jorg Bergmeister and team owner Patrick Lindsey behind the wheel.

• Results

“That feels good,” Werner said after watching Pilet cross the finish line. “More important for everybody on this team, we got what everybody worked for so long. [For] over one year, everybody was waiting for this win. This race went flawless without any issues. With our teammates in P2, it cannot get any better.”

Pilet was handed a comfortable lead when he took over from Werner thanks to a mistake by Bruni in the sister Porsche, and managed the gap until the checkered flag. Martin Tomczyk was almost a lap down in third with the No. 24 BMW Team RLL M6 he shares with John Edwards.

Bruni owned the Northeast Grand Prix’s opening stint as he sprinted away from pole position and drew out a lead that rested in the three-second range over Werner. The utter dominance of the Porsche GT Le Mans cars was demonstrated with the gap to the rest of the GTLM field as Edwards trailed Werner by 11 seconds and sat 14 seconds behind Bruni before the first round of pit stops had arrived.

Bruni completed 50 flawless minutes in the No. 912 before surrendering the lead with an off-track excursion. His mistake was costly on a personal level, but the other Porsche was primed to step in and lead.

The Italian pitted to have the Porsche 911 RSR’s radiator inlet ducts cleared of dirt and grass, handed over to teammate Vanthoor, and the Belgian began his effort to recover the 20 seconds or so lost by Bruni. Vanthoor made slight inroads on Pilet, but still finished 14.5 seconds arrears to the winner. Tomczyk took the final podium spot, but did so after coming home 39.9 seconds behind Pilet on a track where GTLM cars set their best race laps in the 51-second range.

The Ford Chip Ganassi Racing team went for a repeat of its daring one-stop race strategy that brought its first win with the No. 67 Ford GT in Monterey last year. This time, it came within five minutes of finding a modicum of success with the ploy. Despite starting second with fuel-meister Richard Westbrook onboard the No. 67, the FCGR team knew the Porsches would walk away and had the Briton saving copious amounts of fuel from the start.

Westbrook went an amazing 1h17m on a tank of fuel – 87 laps – and handed over to Ryan Briscoe with 1h23m left to complete. Packing 25 GTLM and GTD cars onto the tight 1.5-mile Lime Rock track was a surefire recipe for at least one caution to help Briscoe with fuel saving, but it never came. He was forced to pit for a splash of fuel with five minutes left to run and surrendered third place to Tomczyk. Antonio Garcia was promoted to fourth in the No. 3 Corvette as Briscoe ambled home 52 seconds behind Pilet in fifth.

“It was a gamble doing it, but we had to do something,” Westbrook said. “The Porsches were way too fast. We rolled the dice.”

While it couldn’t be said of GTD, GTLM was relatively clean from start to finish, barring a mistake by Tommy Milner in the No. 4 Corvette C7.R.

An outside passing on Dirk Muller in the No. 66 Ford GT led to a spin for the Corvette, which hit the Ford while sailing backward. Milner briefly returned to the track before heading back to the pits for time-consuming repairs that would take 30 laps. Muller lost four laps and continued after the Ford Chip Ganassi Racing team replaced a broken suspension component.

“It’s hard to tell what happened there,” Milner said. “It looked like the Ford checked up earlier than I expected; I tried whatever I could to not hit him but that probably caused more problems. I’m sorry for those guys. I never want to be involved in an accident like that and take somebody else out of the race. Looking at the data, I was slower than I had been going in there. But that’s racing. We’re trying to make split-second decisions. Most of the times they are the right ones, but every now and then they’re the wrong ones.”

The No. 66 Ford clawed its way back to seventh in class. The No. 4 Corvette was last in GTLM.

Lime Rock’s big crowd was frequently entertained by hits, spins and unforced errors in GTD. Even the race-winning Park Place Porsche engaged in a punch or two on the road to Victory Lane as carnage and mistakes shaped the podium.

A smart drive by polesitter Madison Snow and Bryan Sellers helped the No. 48 Paul Miller Racing Lamborghini Huracan GT3 to take second, and inspired drives by Pat Long and Daniel Morad in the No. 28 Alegra Motorsports Porsche 911 GT3 R gave the Rolex 24 at Daytona winners a fine third.

“It was a battle royale at the start, I had a couple of grind offs with the Lexus guys, but at the end of the day, we had great track position, which is important here” Lindsey said while marveling at Bergmeister’s performance. “It allowed Jorg to run a relatively clean race compared to mine…made me feel bad about the bumping and grinding I did early on.”

Bergmeister crossed the start/finish line with 3.4 seconds in hand over Sellers and 4.2 seconds on Long.

“With a call of about 30 minutes to go, I had a feeling that’s when the pace would ramp up,” Sellers said. “I could hang out with Bergmeister for the first five to 10 minutes. From there on, it was just making sure I could still maintain and not lose to Patrick Long behind us.”

The untold story of the GTD race came from the 3GT Racing Lexus camp, where the No. 15 RC F GT3 driven by Jack Hawksworth was in a position to deliver the brand’s first win. The former IndyCar driver passed Jens Klingmann in Turner Motorsport’s No. 96 BMW M6 GT3 on Lap 76 and held the position until giving the Lexus over to Robert Alon with one hour remaining. The stop would quickly unravel their chances. The service ran long, Alon stalled the car while trying to leave the pits, and once the final GTD stops were completed, the Lexus was relegated to fifth. Alon would lose more positions on the road before coming home an unrepresentative seventh.

Katherine Legge made few friends at Lime Rock after hitting and knocking the No. 16 Change Racing Lamborghini into the barrier in the opening moments of the race. A double winner this season, Legge received a drive-through penalty for the contact, which cost a lap. And there was more to come from the No. 93 Michael Shank Racing Acura NSX GT3. Dion von Moltke, driving the No. 75 SunEnergy1 Racing Mercedes-AMG GT3, was the next to get hit by Legge, who nerfed the German machine into the grass. IMSA sent another drive-through request to the MSR pits, and by Lap 20, the No. 93 served its second penalty. Once Andy Lally stepped into the car, the rough driving continued and it was needed to overcome the earlier setbacks. It wasn’t a win, but his efforts to haul the No. 93 up to fifth at the finish was nothing short of remarkable.

Unwilling to let the Acura team get through the race without a taste of adversity, the racing gods seemingly dispatched Townsend Bell to pull the exact same nerfing maneuver on the sister No. 86 Acura driven by Jeff Segal. The hit took place in the same corner and in the same manner that earned Legge her second drive-through. For the sake of consistency, IMSA extended the same invitation to Bell, who took the No. 23 Alex Job Racing Audi R8 LMS GT3 for a slow stroll down pit lane to pay for his offense.

The No. 33 Riley Motorsports Mercedes-AMG GT3 lost a painful amount of points just after the halfway point when Jeroen Bleekemolen suffered a rear suspension failure on the car. It’s possible that contact it received from Klingmann in the Turner BMW caused the problem. Klingmann would soon join Bleekemolen behind the wall for necessary repairs to his BMW.

The Mercedes, which held second in the standings coming into Lime Rock, would retire, while the BMW lost 12 laps before finishing 14th at Turner’s home race. With a 1-2 in GTLM and a 1-3 in GTD, Porsche fans will have plenty to celebrate until IMSA’s WeatherTech SportsCar Championship returns August 6 at Road America.