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[TheStranger]

So, I was watching an old video clip of the last few laps of the last ever IMSA GTP race at Riverside - a GREAT finish between the Lowenbrau (Holbert) Porsche 962 of Chip Robinson and the Group 44 Jaguar of John Morton, as the latter was able to hunt down the dominating vehicle from Zuffenhausen and make the winning pass through the kink and into the famous Turn Nine, with a hair over a lap left. Sad to see that track long gone but a fitting ending, a phenomenal finale for major sports car racing in Southern California.

During those late stages, as Morton was making his charge, Bob Varsha commented on several previous close finishes at the venue, including Al Holbert losing to John Fitzpatrick by four seconds earlier in the decade, and Morton's involvement in the 1985 race, in which the margin of victory between the two Busby/BF Goodrich 962s was a mere .13 second.

In a subsequent viewing of the 1985 Riverside videoclip, the commentators (whose highlighting of the BF Goodrich program throughout makes me think that the tire company heavily sponsored this broadcast) noted...

"They are not racing each other, there is no drama in this. They are just forming up close together so they can cross the finish line in picture perfect fashion."

(The sentence in question can be found at 7:06 within the clip at )

Now, it seems like Busby in the sister car lets up in Turn 7 on that final lap as they approach traffic, but on Turn 8 showed a little more of an attempt at getting beneath Morton. Still, hard to really tell without any telemetry or truly obvious signs of easing up from either car - they may have been driving carefully but still maintaining their lines and rhythm for that last 3.27 mile go-around.

If this was indeed a case of team orders to safely guarantee that 1-2 finish for the team...it's interesting how much this was publicly acknowledged, especially since racing in the United States isn't really known for team orders the way it is overseas.