When you’re hot, you’re hot, and Saturday at the historic Watkins Glen Int’l  race circuit in the Grand American Rolex Series, the near 100-degree temperatures in which the Sahlen’s Six Hours of the Glen was run wasn’t the only thing blistering the track.
Right up there with Mother Nature were 48-year-old Scott Pruett and his Chip Ganassi partner Memo Rojas, the pair taking yet another victory with their Telmex Lexus Riley, in what, for their rivals, is becoming an all too frequent pattern this season.
In many ways, the dominance of the duo, which started 2008 with a well-deserved triumph in the Rolex 24, it is hard to understand, for while the well-oiled Ganassi operation is on a roll, its opposition is by no means anywhere near being overwhelmed.
Indeed, as usual, there were only a few seconds separating the top-five leaders after six hours of racing, a stark contrast to the way the affair used to end years ago when the differential between first and second was often measured in entire laps.
In the affair that saw nine cautions, coming up just a little short were Brumos drivers Daren Law and David Donohue, who booked their best showing of the ’08 campaign with their Porsche-powered Riley by finishing second, after leading for a good part of the time. The effort was particularly noteworthy given the fact the event was dedicated to their late boss, Brumos’s leader Bob Snodgrass, who died a year ago, and whose roots were to be found in the upstate New York community.
Third were Max Angelelli and Michael Valiante, not driving  their new Dallara, but rather their old SunTrust Pontiac Riley. That switch was forced on the Wayne Taylor camp when the team’s transporter burned to the ground on the way back from the Rolex race at Laguna Seca, destroying not only the car, but everything else, including all the organization’s equipment and spare parts. With help from their rivals in the paddock, including the Ganassi folks, Taylor and company were able to make the Glen and were rewarded for their efforts, though Angelelli had to be assisted from the car after the checkered flag because of heat exhaustion, something that didn’t bother Pruett, who stayed in the winning Riley for nearly three hours.
Asked afterward about his experience, Pruett noted that the heat hadn’t really bothered him. “It wasn’t that bad,” he said. “The car was nearly perfect, very well balanced.” The crew really did a great job today. The top three were followed across the line by one more Riley, the Ford-motivated Michael Shank Racing machine of Oswaldo Negri and Mark Patterson, with the Dallara Ford from Doran Racing breaking the Riley string in fifth, courtesy of Memo Gidley and Brad Jaeger.
In GT, the story this year has been the Pontiac-Mazda contest, with the Porsche camp looking in from the outside without a single victory during the first part of the year. In an attempt to redress what they perceived as an imbalance, Grand Am officials imposed an extra 100-pound minimum-weight standard for the GM cars, starting at the Glen. Moreover, the authorities mandated that the weight be added to the front of the front-engined coupes, an unusual move as normally teams are allowed to distribute such added poundage as they see fit.
The result of all of this was breaking Pontiac’s string of recent first-place performances, although it didn’t do much for the Porsches, which were still left on the outside, looking in.
Up front was the SpeedSource Mazda of Nick Longhi and Jeff Segal,  posting their first GT victory. It was an especially significant moment for Segal, who only recently won his first-ever professional Grand Am event when he pulled off the track at Lime Rock Park on Memorial Day weekend in the Koni Challenge.
Second went to Robin Liddell and Andrew Davis in their Stevenson Pontiac GXP-R, while third belonged to the points leaders, Paul Edwards and Kelly Collins in their Banner Racing GXP-R. The best-placed Porsche was the GT3 of Tim Lewis, Jr., and Lawson Achenbach who brought their Autohaus Motorsports entry across the line in fourth.