Jones, Lazare sweep IMSA VP Challenge weekend in St. Pete

The wins felt so nice they decided to do it twice.

Jagger Jones and Jesse Lazare completed the sweep of rounds three and four in the Le Mans Prototype 3 (P3) and Grand Sport X (GSX) classes of the VP Racing SportsCar Challenge at the Grand Prix of St. Petersburg on Saturday.

Jones made it a priority for the No. 87 FastMD Racing with Remstar Duqueine D08 to open a comfortable gap on the field at the start of the second race of the day, and with each of the two restarts from full-course caution, to make things as easy on himself as possible. It worked following the final restart with just over eight minutes to go in the 45-minute sprint as he finished 3.815s ahead of P3 Bronze Cup winner Miguel Villagomez in the No. 23 Escuderia ABRO Ligier JS P320 and 14.764s ahead of third-place finisher Brian Thienes in the No. 77 Forte Racing Ligier.

“Full sweep of the weekend – it’s awesome,” exclaimed Jones, whose only previous VP Racing Challenge races came in the final 2023 round at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta. “It feels so good to be winning races. I think last year was my first year in my career of racing that I didn’t win a race with racing Indy NXT.

“The team got me such a good car – we even got the car way better for the second race, which is almost scary with how fast we’d already been all weekend. I was just taking it easy, making sure I didn’t make any mistakes. That’s all I had to do. … Hopefully I can come back and do some more races with Remstar.”