A Year After Breaking His Back at This Track, Tom Dillmann Won There Again

Tom Dillmann and Jeremy Clarke won the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship's Chevrolet Grand Prix outright, taking Inter Europol Competition's No. 43 ORECA 07-Gibson to the overall victory at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park on July 12 — the team's first win since the 2025 12 Hours of Sebring, earned from pole position on a circuit the drivers know better than most for reasons that have nothing to do with lap times.

A year earlier, at the same track, Dillmann's race ended in the wall. During the closing minutes of the 2025 Chevrolet Grand Prix, a mechanical failure sent his ORECA hard into the Turn 3 barrier while he was chasing back-to-back CTMP wins for Inter Europol. The impact broke two vertebrae in his back. He underwent surgery, missed only the following round at Road America, and was back in the car within weeks — telling reporters at the time that "the injury doesn't change much… it was a car failure so there's no confidence loss."

That recovery is what made Saturday's result land the way it did. Dillmann and Clarke controlled long stretches of the race from the front, held off a late push from CrowdStrike Racing's Alex Quinn, and brought the ORECA home for a win that both the team and Dillmann described afterward as a form of redemption — the same corner of the same track that ended one year's race in a hospital visit instead delivering the next year's win.

The GTD class produced its own tight finish: Winward Racing's Russell Ward and Philip Ellis, in the No. 57 Mercedes-AMG GT3 EVO, passed Wayne Taylor Racing's Lamborghini Huracán GT3 EVO2 for the class lead just past the race's halfway point and held on to the finish, giving the two-time defending GTD champions their second win of the season after a stretch of races complicated by mechanical trouble and contact. Between Dillmann's comeback story up front and Winward's late-race pass in GTD, it was a rare weekend where the overall result and the undercard both delivered.