Road America’s Historic Round 5: A New Chapter for Lamborghini Super Trofeo
Round 5 of the Lamborghini Blancpain Super Trofeo North America at Road America produced something the series had never seen: an overall podium swept entirely by Pro-Am competitors. Trent Hindman and Craig Duerson, driving the No. 10 Lamborghini Huracán LP 620-2 for Prestige Performance out of Lamborghini Paramus, secured their inaugural overall victory by a margin of 1.093 seconds over Richard Antinucci and Brian Thienes. Brandon Gdovic completed the all-Pro-Am podium in third.
In most one-make series, Pro and Pro-Am classes share the same grid but occupy different competitive universes. Pro entries field full-time professionals with factory-level preparation. Pro-Am teams pair a professional driver with a gentleman racer, a format designed to keep the series accessible to paying customers who want real competition rather than glorified track days. For a Pro-Am pairing to win outright, the professional driver must extract every tenth during their stint, the amateur must lose almost nothing, and the team’s strategy must be flawless. For the entire podium to come from that class in a single race is a statement about how competitive the amateur ranks in this series had become during 2016.
Jackie Heinricher added another first to the weekend. Competing in the Lamborghini Cup class with DAC Motorsports representing Lamborghini Palm Beach, Heinricher became the first woman to race in the North American Super Trofeo series and finished second in class in her debut start. That combination of firsts made this particular Friday afternoon at Elkhart Lake one of the more quietly important moments in Lamborghini’s customer racing history.
The Strategic Triumph: How Hindman and Duerson Won from Third on the Grid
Hindman lined up third behind teammate Shinya Michimi and pole-sitter Antinucci, who carried the weight of a 2015 Super Trofeo North America Pro Driver Championship into the weekend. At the green flag, Hindman jumped Michimi for second and settled into a pursuit of Antinucci through the opening stint. The top three pulled away from the rest of the field, opening a gap of 17.687 seconds to fourth place at one point, turning the race into a private battle among the leaders.
Antinucci stretched his advantage but could never build a decisive margin. Then the race pivoted. An incident in Turn 1 triggered a full-course yellow just seconds before the mandatory pit stop window was scheduled to open. The caution compressed the field, erasing whatever time Antinucci had banked. At the restart, both Antinucci and Hindman chose to stay out rather than pit immediately, gambling on clean-air laps while the rest of the field cycled through stops.
That decision, combined with what Lamborghini described as strong pit stop execution by Prestige Performance and Wayne Taylor Racing, put Craig Duerson into the lead once the stops sorted themselves out. Thienes emerged in second after taking over the No. 17 US RaceTronics car, with Gdovic third. With just over ten minutes remaining, Will James made hard contact with the wall in Road America’s notorious Kink section, bringing out a second full-course yellow. The damage proved too extensive to clear in time, and the race ended under caution, freezing the order and handing Hindman and Duerson their first overall win.
“It was more of a learning experience for me than an actual race,” Hindman said afterward. “But it was a test session for some ideas we had on the car and some ideas I had driving-wise. The Prestige Performance and Wayne Taylor Racing guys gave us an unbelievable car today. But we still have some improvements to make.”
That candor is worth noting. Even a winning drive in customer motorsport involves development work, and Hindman acknowledged that his opening stint was as much about gathering data as racing. The victory was Hindman and Duerson’s fourth Pro-Am podium and third class win of the season, the kind of consistency that builds toward exactly this sort of breakthrough.
A Series of Firsts: Pro-Am Dominance and Jackie Heinricher’s Groundbreaking Debut
The all-Pro-Am overall podium raises a question that goes beyond a single race result: what does it say about the health of a one-make series when its gentleman-driver class can beat the outright professionals? One reading is that the Pro entries simply had a bad day. A more interesting reading, and one supported by the broader 2016 season trajectory, is that the Pro-Am teams in Super Trofeo North America were investing at a level that closed the gap. Prestige Performance’s partnership with Wayne Taylor Racing brought professional-grade engineering support to a Pro-Am effort, a model that would become increasingly common in GT racing.
Jackie Heinricher’s debut carried different weight. As the first woman to compete in the North American Super Trofeo series, her second-place Lamborghini Cup finish with DAC Motorsports went beyond a feel-good story. Customer racing programs live or die on the breadth of their participant base, and Heinricher’s entry signaled that Lamborghini’s series was attracting competitors from demographics that many motorsport programs still struggle to reach. Squadra Corse, which organizes the Super Trofeo globally, benefits directly when its grid diversifies: more participants mean more car sales, more dealer engagement, and a broader marketing story.
Elsewhere in the results, the father-son pairing of Jim and Josh Norman earned their first Amateur class victory with the No. 71 Change Racing entry representing Lamborghini Carolinas. Their teammate Luis Rodriguez Jr. held the class lead until a pit stop penalty dropped him to second. Ross Chouest, meanwhile, extended a remarkable Lamborghini Cup winning streak to five consecutive victories in the No. 3 DXDT Racing entry representing Lamborghini Miami, a run of dominance suggesting he was simply operating on a different level within his class.
Behind the Wheel: The Huracán LP 620-2 on Road America’s 14 Turns
Road America’s 4.048-mile layout rewards cars with strong straight-line speed and drivers who can manage tire degradation through fast, flowing corners like the Kink and the Carousel. The Huracán LP 620-2 Super Trofeo, a rear-wheel-drive race car derived from the road-going Huracán, places enormous emphasis on driver skill precisely because it lacks the all-wheel-drive safety net of the street car. That rear-drive configuration makes throttle management critical, particularly on a circuit where elevation changes and high-speed direction transitions punish sloppy inputs.
The series launched in 2009 using the Gallardo LP560-4 Super Trofeo before transitioning to the Huracán platform for the 2015 season. By 2016, teams were developing a deeper understanding of the LP 620-2’s behavior. The strategic choices visible in this race, particularly the decision by Hindman and Antinucci to stay out for clean-air laps rather than pit under caution, reflect that growing confidence in the car’s tire management and fuel window.
Duerson’s post-race comments were characteristically understated: “Trent drove the first stint and we did what we needed to do and we finished on the top. Hats off to the team and Trent.” The brevity masks the complexity. In a 50-minute race with mandatory driver changes, the amateur driver’s stint is where Pro-Am races are won or lost. Duerson’s ability to maintain the gap that Hindman and the pit crew had built is what separated a class win from an overall victory.
What This Means for Lamborghini’s Motorsport Ladder
Lamborghini’s customer racing ecosystem functions as a pipeline. The Super Trofeo series sits at the entry point, giving dealers a reason to sell race cars and giving amateur drivers a structured environment to develop. Successful Pro-Am drivers can progress to GT3 competition, where the stakes and the speed increase significantly. The quality of competition at the Super Trofeo level directly affects the talent pool available for those higher categories.
An all-Pro-Am podium at Road America, then, is not just a curiosity. It is evidence that the lower rungs of Lamborghini’s ladder were producing competitive drivers and well-organized teams. Prestige Performance’s eleven wins across the 2016 season and sweep of all four available championships confirmed that the series was generating the kind of sustained excellence that justifies the investment from both Squadra Corse and the participating dealerships.
For anyone considering a Super Trofeo entry, the practical takeaway from Road America is that preparation and team infrastructure matter as much as raw driving talent. The Hindman/Duerson car benefited from Wayne Taylor Racing’s operational support, a resource that not every Pro-Am team can access. Prospective participants should weigh the quality of their team’s engineering and pit crew support as carefully as they weigh their own seat time.
Rival one-make series from Ferrari and Porsche operate on similar principles, pairing customer car sales with organized competition. Lamborghini’s differentiator in 2016 was the rear-wheel-drive Huracán platform, which demanded more from its drivers than the all-wheel-drive alternatives common in competing championships. Whether that made the series more appealing or more intimidating depended entirely on the driver. The results at Road America suggested it was attracting people who wanted the harder challenge.
Full Race Results and Class Winners
| Position | Class | Drivers | Car No. | Team | Dealership |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st Overall | Pro-Am | Trent Hindman / Craig Duerson | 10 | Prestige Performance | Lamborghini Paramus |
| 2nd Overall | Pro-Am | Richard Antinucci / Brian Thienes | 17 | US RaceTronics | Lamborghini Beverly Hills |
| 3rd Overall | Pro-Am | Brandon Gdovic | 46 | DAC Motorsports | Lamborghini Palm Beach |
| 1st Amateur | Amateur | Jim Norman / Josh Norman | 71 | Change Racing | Lamborghini Carolinas |
| 2nd Amateur | Amateur | Luis Rodriguez Jr. | 29 | Change Racing | Lamborghini Carolinas |
| 3rd Amateur | Amateur | Damon Ockey | 09 | US RaceTronics | Lamborghini Calgary |
| 1st Lambo Cup | Lamborghini Cup | Ross Chouest | 3 | DXDT Racing | Lamborghini Miami |
| 2nd Lambo Cup | Lamborghini Cup | Jackie Heinricher | 57 | DAC Motorsports | Lamborghini Palm Beach |
| 3rd Lambo Cup | Lamborghini Cup | Shawn Lawless | 27 | Dream Racing Motorsports | Lamborghini Las Vegas |
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