Diaz and Fernandez took a fourth straight ALMS race.

WEST OF SALT LAKE CITY, UT — In nail-biting fashion, Adrian Fernandez and Luis Diaz came from behind to take their fourth straight victory in the American Le Mans series at the Larry H. Miller Dealerships Utah Grand Prix presented by the Grand and Little America Hotels in the LMP2 class,  taking the checkered flag by a scant .58 seconds over their Team Dyson Lola competitior.

The Lowes Fernandez Acura ARX-01b withstood a late dice with Dyson Racing’s Butch Leitzinger, who just missed the team’s first win with Marino Franchitti in one of Dyson’s Mazda-powered Lola B09/86 coupes. The two Lolas were the early leaders in the class when Diaz got caught up in the remants of a shunt that happened at the start. It took him nearly 30 laps to weave his way into position to start reeling in the Mazdas.

Meanwhile the Acura LMP1 cars were having their own battle at the front of the race as Simon Pagenaud and Gil de Ferran scored their second American Le Mans Series victory a year after making their debut with a win here. The pairing dominated in their de Ferran Motorsports Acura ARX-02a with a comfortable 1:13.693 margin over Patrón Highcroft Racing’s Acura of David Brabham and Scott Sharp. It was the second straight win in the LMP1 class for Pagenaud and de Ferran.

Notes Fernandez, “It was a little frustrating at the beginning when Luis was losing time to the leaders with the traffic. There were a few P1s that we were quite a bit quicker than and he just couldn’t pass them. I give Luis a lot of credit to have the patience because it would have been so easy to throw it away at the beginning knowing that you were losing so much time. We were losing four or five seconds a lap sometimes, to a point that we were almost 50 seconds behind the leader of the P2s.

Jörg Bergmeister and Patrick Long won for the third straight race in GT2 with a victory in their Flying Lizard Motorsports Porsche 911 GT3 RSR. The duo led the entire way and finished 74.559 seconds ahead of Farnbacher Loles Racing’s Porsche of Marc Lieb and Wolf Henzler.

Martin and Melanie Snow were winners in the inaugural Challenge class race. The husband-wife duo took a 38.782-second victory in their Snow Racing Porsche 911 GT3 Cup entry over the ORBIT Racing Porsche of Guy Cosmo and John Baker.

The Snows were winners at the first American Le Mans Series race in 1999 at Sebring with a GTS class victory behind the wheel of a Porsche 911 Turbo.