Joao Barbosa and Filipe Albuquerque have won the Bubba Burger Sportscar Grand Prix at Long Beach in the #5 Mustang Sampling Cadillac DPi-VR ahead of the two Team Penske Acuras of Taylor/Castroneves and Cameron/Montoya. In GTLM, Earl Bamber and Laurens Vanthoor took victory for Porsche in the #912 911 RSR.
During the eventful 100-minute race on the streets of Long Beach, there was drama early on as Jon Bennett in the #54 Nissan DPi hit the tires on the exit of turn 7 in the opening laps, bringing an early end to CORE Autosport's afternoon and bringing out a first full course caution, but not before Jordan Taylor in the #10 Cadillac and Jonathan Bomarito in the #55 made contact at turn 8, causing the Mazda to spin.
Repairs would leave the Mazda two laps down, while the Cadillac wouldn't see the finish line at all after Taylor's team-mate Renger van der Zande made heavy contact with the wall at turn 9, crashing out of the race.
During the second round of pitstops, the #5 of Albuquerque and Barbosa crucially stopped before the rest of the DPi field, which resulted in the Mustang Sampling machine taking the lead ahead of both Team Penske Acuras, In the closing minutes, Albuquerque fought off heavy pressure from Penske's Ricky Taylor to take a third consecutive victory for Cadillac in the 2019 season.
In GTLM, Porsche made good use of their qualifying pace by opening up a gap to their rivals early on. Eventually, after the first round of pitstops, Earl Bamber quickly made his way back up to 2nd place before passing Patrick Pilet in the sister car to take the lead, which he would not give way despite suffering significant damage to his rear diffuser.
Behind him, meanwhile, a battle between Ford and Corvette reached a boiling point on the final lap as Dirk Mueller tried too hard to fend of the pair of Corvettes driven by Jan Magnussen and Tommy Milner. In turn 8, Magnussen came into contact with the Ford, punting Mueller hard into the wall. Magnussen brought the wounded Corvette home ahead of Milner, who finished third.
