Even though there was not much suspense at the finish line, with the race winner finishing nearly 23 seconds before second place, there was still plenty of excitement for one team at the Utah Grand Prix.

Penske racing team finished with a first and second place and the Porsche RS Spyder took three of the top four spots to dominate the track on Sunday.

Timo Bernard and Romain Dumas took advantage of a late pit stop for de Ferran Motorsports driver Simon Pagenaud during lap 74, from there Dumas led the final 22 laps to take home the victory by 22.656 seconds, it was their second win of the series this season.

"I am so happy. Yesterday we captured overall pole and now we have won overall with a great race and great strategy," said Bernhard, the first half of the winning team. "There were a lot of cautions at the beginning and it wasn't easy to get into a rhythm. But it was a perfect run."

Returning champion Sascha Maassen and teammate Patrick Long continually crept up on the leader but had to settle for second overall. Former Indianapolis 500 winner Gil de Ferran debuted his own racing team in the Grand Prix and with teammate Pagenaud were able to finish in third place overall. Pagenaud made a mad dash for second place in the final laps but came up four seconds short.

With two cautions totaling six laps all together there were plenty of fender benders for the fans that like destruction.

It only took seven laps to create the first contact as Luis Diaz bumped into Jon Field causing little damage but enough debris on the track to cause a caution.

Right as the race went back to green, at the end of first turn, racers got into it again. Scott Sharp spun out right in the middle of a crowd of cars at turn one, running into Christian Fittipaldi, causing damage to his own car, but both cars continued to race, with damage however.

With the track being the outside course with less turns than last year, the thinking was that the LMP1 cars would be hard to beat, being the stronger cars. However, all three LMP1 class cars had difficulties keeping up with the LMP2 cars that took the top six spots overall.

Lucas Luhr and Marco Werner teamed up in the number 2 car to take LMP1 division finish 95 laps at a time just over two hours and 45 seconds in the Audi R10 TDI. Luhr and Werner finished more than seven laps ahead of their closest LMP1 competition.

In the GT1 division Johnny O'Connell and Jan Magnussen in the number 3 car narrowly beat out fellow Corvette Racing teammates Olivier Beretta and Oliver Gavin by just over a second.

The GT2 class was dominated by the same team almost throughout the race. Wolf Henzler and Joerg Bergmeister teamed up with Flying Lizard Motorsports beat all the competition by more than a lap.

jgordon@tooeletranscript.com