INDIANAPOLIS, Indiana (September 19, 2026) – Paul Miller Racing’s position at the top of the GTD PRO standings became especially valuable on Saturday at Indianapolis.
With weather forcing the cancellation of the GTD and GTD PRO qualifying sessions, Sunday’s starting grid will instead be determined by the current championship order.
That puts the No. 1 BMW M4 GT3 EVO of Neil Verhagen and Connor De Phillippi at the front of the class. The No. 4 Corvette, currently second in the championship, will line up alongside in P2, meaning the first row of the grid mirrors the top of the points table.
There is one important difference, however. With qualifying abandoned, no qualifying points are awarded. Paul Miller Racing therefore takes the same 23-point championship advantage into Sunday’s race that it carried into the weekend.
IMSA regulations specify that when qualifying is abandoned, cars are ordered within their class by Team championship points and no qualifying points are distributed.
For Verhagen, missing the session came with some disappointment. Qualifying has regularly been one of the strengths of the No. 1 BMW this season, while the team used much of its practice running at Indianapolis to work in another direction.
After recent weekends where strong qualifying performances did not always translate into the same level of race pace, more attention was placed on the long runs ahead of Sunday’s 2-hour, 40-minute race.
That work left Verhagen confident in the car despite never getting the opportunity to see what it could do over a qualifying lap.
There was another reason he wanted to put the BMW on track on Saturday. This weekend, the No. 1 carries the name of Chanel M. as part of IMSA’s Resilient Racers program with the Austin Hatcher Foundation. Instead of watching the car qualify, Chanel will now get to see it start Sunday’s race from the front of the GTD PRO field.
“It’s disappointing that we don’t get to go out there,” said Verhagen.
“We’ve had very strong qualifyings all year and we’ve been able to score a lot of points from qualifying, so to miss out on that opportunity today is for sure disappointing. Nevertheless, we’ll take starting from the front. I guess that’s the perk of being the championship leaders.
“We focused a lot on the long-run pace and felt very confident with that. That’s where we’ve struggled a little bit in the past couple of rounds. The qualifying has been there, but we just seemed to lack a little bit on the race pace side, so we put extra emphasis on that this weekend.
“It’s also a shame not to see the No. 1 BMW out on track today, especially this weekend with the Austin Hatcher Foundation and Chanel on the car for us. We wanted to put it out front for her, but at least she’ll get to see us start from the front row for tomorrow’s race.”
Sunday now becomes the first opportunity of the weekend for the championship leaders to put that race-focused preparation to use. Indianapolis is the final 2-hour, 40-minute sprint of the season before the championship concludes with the 10-hour Motul Petit Le Mans at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta.
The TireRack.com Battle On The Bricks gets underway on Sunday, September 20, at 3:10 p.m. ET. Live coverage begins at 3:00 p.m. ET on NBC, with streaming available on Peacock, IMSA.tv and the IMSA Official YouTube channel.
