ALMS saw a lot of close finishes in 2007

Long Beach 2007

The numbers bear it out: the 2007 American Le Mans Series was the closest and most competitive on record. Thirteen of the 50 closest finishes in Series history came during this season’s 12-round schedule, a statistic that stands head and shoulders above any other year of Series competition.

Close finishes and endurance racing usually don’t go hand-in-hand. That wasn’t the case this year. Five races saw margins of victory less than one second, and only Sebring saw just one lead-lap finisher.

The average margin of victory for the remaining 11 rounds was 4.55 seconds.

The Series saw its closest finish ever in LMP2 (0.116 seconds at St. Petersburg) and GT2 (0.202 seconds at Sebring). The combined overall winning margin at Petit Le Mans and the Monterey Sports Car Championships was 1.333. As tight as it seems, it still ranked third among consecutive events this year.

That honor goes to St. Petersburg and Long Beach, which had a combined margin of victory of 1.186 seconds. Coincidentally the Long Beach-Houston overall finishes were 1.25 seconds. In fact, the margin of victory in those three races was a combined 1.676 seconds. To put that in perspective, only 17 of 88 single-event overall victory margins were closer than that, and the closest back-to-back margin of victory prior to this year was the 2006 finish at Utah, a gap of 3.194 seconds.

A total of 23 different entrants scored class podium finishes in 2007, as well.