MONTEREY, Calif. — For the second consecutive event, the overall victory in the Monterey Sports Car Championships — the four-hour ALMS season finale Saturday at Laguna Seca’s Mazda Raceway — came down to a battle of seconds between the Audi North America R10 turbo diesel and the DHL-backed Porsche RS Spyder of Roger Penske’s team.
And again it was Audi’s Rinaldo Capello defeating Penske’s Romain Dumas by just four tenths of a second after 157 laps of tough racing in which the LMP1 division champion Audi swapped the front-running position with the LMP2 title-winning Porsche.
For Capello, who took over from Allan McNish, beating Dumas and driving partner Timo Bernhard was more satisfying than finishing ahead of them at Road Atlanta in the 1,000-mile Petit Le Mans event two weeks earlier.
“I would rate this race even better than Petit,” Capello said. “At least there we had an advantage on the long straight, which we lost here. It was not easy in the last 15 minutes, and it only got harder.”
Not only did Dumas keep his yellow Porsche within feet of the silver Audi’s tailpipes, at one point Dumas quickly pushed past for the lead, only to lose it seconds later, as Capello used the superior torque of the diesel to slip back by his rival.
Therein can be found the dilemma of the ALMS. Winning at Laguna was a matter of who “controlled” the race, a fact that McNish, who pushed past for the lead on the start, was well aware of.
“To win, we needed to control the race, and the only way we could do that was from the front,” he said.
So what Laguna came down to was the fact that if one takes away anything from the 2007 season it is that the ALMS, through its “rules adjustments,” has produced and entertaining show but one that could be endangered in 2008 if the ALMS follows the lead of Le Mans officials and adds 50 kilograms of weight to the LMP2 class entries.
When asked about whether he and the Porsches would be back next year, Penske said that would depend on the rules.
It isn’t just Porsche. At Laguna, the Acura LMP2 camp showed its muscle and maturity as well, with Luis Diaz and Adrian Fernandez taking their Acura-powered Lola to fifth overall. Third in class was the Andretti-Green Acura ARX-01a of Bryan Herta and Tony Kanaan.
Indeed, had not the two suffered from problems, some self-induced, they may have well been even higher in the standings, which saw Mike Rockenfeller and Marco Werner take third in the outright finishing order with the R10, just feet ahead of Sascha Maassen and Ryan Briscoe who were fourth overall, and second in LM2 in the Penske DHL RS Spyder.
Moreover, if Stefan Johansson, co-driving with David Brabham in the Highcroft Racing ARX-01a had not tangled with the Rockenfeller-Werner R10 in a fight for the overall, it may well have been that he and his teammate could have won.
Johansson wound up causing one of the several long caution periods that punctuated the action. Even so, with the Acuras obviously maturing, and with little to choose between the Porsches and the Audis, the ALMS has done well in meeting its goals for promoting interest in what it does this year.
Somewhat less exciting was the Corvette contest in the GT1 production car division where Oliver Gavin and Olivier Beretta finished ahead of Jan Magnussen and Johnny O’Connell taking the 11th and 12th overall spots behind the two Dyson Racing RS Spyders of  Guy Smith and Chris Dyson and Andy Wallace and Butch Leitzinger, which were in seventh and eighth, and the Creation Judd of Harold Primat and Jamie Campbell-Walter which was third in LMP1, and the Zytek of Tim Chilton and Darren Manning that was fourth in the top prototype division.
The contest in the GT2 category, the only one where all the honors remained undecided coming to Laguna, was hard fought, but, in the end it turned out as many had expected with Risi Competizione Ferrari 330GT of Mika Salo and Jaime Melo leading a parade of Porsches under the checkered flag to claim not only the victory, but the driver crown for themselves, the manufacturer title for Ferrari and the team championship for Risi.
Second went to the Farnbacher-Loles 911 GT3RSR of Wolf Henzler and Dominick Farnbacher.