Michael de Quesada claimed his second consecutive Motul Pole Award in the Grand Sport (GS) class of the IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge with a new track record Saturday at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course.

De Quesada lapped the technical road course in 1m26.262s (94.233mph) in the No. 69 Motorsports In Action McLaren Artura GT4, in qualifying for Sunday’s O’Reilly Auto Parts Four Hours of Mid-Ohio. That follows his pole-winning effort for last month’s event at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna, a race he and co-driver Jesse Lazare went on to win. Lazare also won the pole at Sebring International Raceway in March, giving the No. 69 McLaren three straight for the season.

De Quesada expressed surprise that the Mid-Ohio pole lap was not even quicker, considering the entire 2.258-mile circuit was repaved in November.

“For some reason, the track is really slick this weekend,” he noted.

Paul Holton (No. 46 Team TGM Aston Martin Vantage GT4) was the first driver to break Nate Stacy’s 2020 GS track record by notching a 1m26.613s (93.851mph) effort at the halfway point of the 15-minute qualifying session. De Quesada lowered the benchmark to 1m26.480s with six minutes remaining.

Jared Thomas briefly took the No. 3 JTR Motorsports Engineering Porsche 718 GT4 RS Clubsport to the top of the charts, posting a 1m26.469s lap with a little over 90 seconds to go. But barely five seconds later, de Quesada undercut that with the pole-winning lap. Thomas secured the outside front row starting spot in the No. 3 Porsche he shares with Nick Shaeffer.

De Quesada’s pole lap was less than a second better than the quickest lap in the Touring Car (TCR) class. The classes will be split for the start of Sunday’s four-hour race but could quickly intermingle.

“I noticed in practice that the TCR cars are quick around this track,” de Quesada said. “It’s definitely going to make for tough racing, in my opinion. They’re very closely matched with us on the straights and through the corners, so I think the start and working through back markers is going to be a bit complicated. It’s good to see, and hopefully we can get through tomorrow with a clean race and good racing.

“Every race weekend presents its own challenge, and we just have to conquer them,” he added. “I just hope that we take home good points every weekend to slowly chip away and end on top of the championship at the end of the year.”

Wittmer obliterates TCR track record to extend Honda pole streak

The Mid-Ohio track repave proved beneficial to drivers qualifying in the Touring Car (TCR) class, as no fewer than a dozen eclipsed the old class record. None did better than Karl Wittmer, whose 1m27.103s lap (93.323mph) in the No. 93 Montreal Motorsport Group Honda Civic FL5 TCR shattered the previous standard by more than 1.7s.

It delivered Honda a fourth straight TCR pole at Mid-Ohio and gave the veteran Canadian team new to IMSA a second straight Motul Pole Award following the one earned by Bryan Ortiz in the No. 6 Civic at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. Ortiz will start alongside his teammate on the front row in the 16-car TCR field on Sunday.

“Most of the paddock looks at us as IMSA rookies but these guys have been around since 1972,” Wittmer said. “They’ve been a long time running in Canada and worldwide. It’s nice to finally be here and prove that our experience has meaning.”

Wittmer jumped to the top of the leaderboard on his fourth lap, at 1m27.795s. Following a cooldown lap, he found the track ahead wide open and decided to push harder – against the crew’s wishes.

“I put the initial lap down early and then a free track showed up and, well, I’m a driver,” he said with a smile. “Even though they told me not to go, I went. Saddled up and sent it.”

Wittmer’s pole-winning lap was 0.181s better than Robert Wickens in the No. 33 Bryan Herta Autosport with Curb-Agajanian Hyundai Elantra N TCR. The Hyundai, however, was found to not meet minimum ride height standards in post-qualifying technical inspection and moved to the rear of the grid. That moved Ortiz, who qualified third in the No. 6 MMG Honda he shares with LP Montour, to the second starting position.

“It is going to be a long race,” said Wittmer, whose No. 93 co-driver is Dai Yoshihara. “This new surface is extremely smooth but it’s also a little bit greasy as well. We are going to lack grip so it’s all about patience and just trying to find consistency.”

The O’Reilly Auto Parts Four Hours of Mid-Ohio streams live on Peacock in the U.S. and on IMSA.tv outside the U.S. beginning at 12:35 p.m. ET Sunday.

RESULTS

DUBLIN, Ohio — Golfers from the PGA Tour came to Ohio this week for the Memorial Tournament held at the Murfield Village Golf Club in Dublin. 

Here are some photos from the event as play continued through the weekend at the tournament that has attracted thousands of spectators.

Many travelers and history buffs are aware that the British Museum in London is, controversially, the repository for the ancient Parthenon Marbles, also known as the Elgin Marbles, removed from the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, and brought to England in the early 19th century.

But the museum also holds many other historic items from around the world, including some of the most important archeological artifacts from Ohio.

In a glass display case in the British Museum’s Room 26, visitors will find more than two dozen exquisitely fashioned pipes, as well as bowls and other objects recovered from mounds built by the prehistoric Hopewell people of the Scioto Valley.

The display, though small, is the most comprehensive in the world, and is only a small fraction of the Ohio Hopewell items the museum owns.

The pipes, carved some 2,000 years ago from various types of soft stone, known collectively as “pipestone,” were used to smoke tobacco, perhaps during ritual ceremonial observations.

Though some of the pipes are simple bowls, many are exquisitely detailed effigies of birds, frogs, beavers, turtles and other creatures from the Scioto Valley. They demonstrate a level of artistry that offers an intriguing glimpse into the culture of a people we still know relatively little about.

Most of the stone is also native to the area around modern-day Chillicothe, although a few pipes were carved from rock from as far away as Minnesota, indicating a surprising level of travel and trade at the time.

How the items made their way from the vicinity of Chillicothe to England is a fascinating tale in itself.

Although the prehistoric mounds of Ohio were objects of curiosity and speculation since the time of the earliest European trappers and traders in the area, the first real attempt at a scientific exploration of the earthworks was conducted from 1845 to 1847 by Ephraim Squire and Edwin Davis, who surveyed and excavated many of the earthworks in the vicinity of Chillicothe.

Their findings were detailed in the very first volume of the “Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge,” published in 1847 by a brand new scientific organization called the Smithsonian Institution.

Of course, Squire and Davis had gathered quite a significant collection of about 1,300 artifacts from the mounds and in those days, well, finders keepers.

Davis later decided to sell the artifacts, hoping to place them with the Smithsonian which, unfortunately, didn’t have the funds. And so, the Ohio Hopewell collection was purchased by the owner of a private museum in England for $10,000 and sent across the sea.

In 1931, the collection was purchased by the British Museum, which has been its home ever since.

Of course, travelers who are interested enough to stop by the British Museum to view the Hopewell collection (and a whole, whole lot of other great stuff) may also want to see some of the prehistory of England, itself. There’s no better place for that than out on the Salisbury Plain, the home of Stonehenge, as well as a large number of Bronze Age burial mounds that almost perfectly resemble the many prehistoric mounds found in Ohio.

And even though the Hopewell collection is in England, the original Hopewell mound sites are much, much closer to home.

The Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Chillicothe is, like Stonehenge, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, one of just 25 in the United States. The park includes the Mound City group of earthworks and several other earthworks in the Chillicothe area.

The Mound City site also offers a small visitors center and museum that tells the story — at least as much of it as we know — of the Hopewell people and their culture. The park is a can’t-miss destination for history buffs and for anyone intrigued by Ohio’s enigmatic prehistoric peoples. Just don’t expect to see a lot of original artifacts.

For more information about the British Museum’s Hopewell collection, including an interactive online walk through the museum’s Room 26, visit britishmuseum.org.

Steve Stephens is a freelance travel writer and photographer. Email him at sjstephensjr@gmail.com.