After serving their penalties, racing resumed at 2:26 for the two Corvettes, and O'Connell passed Beretta for the lead and the victory.
"A prototype drew down inside of him and he went wide," O'Connell recalled. "I was on the proper line and my momentum carried me by. He was just gathering it up, but there was a gaggle of prototypes doing battle and it was chaotic."
Magnussen had a comparatively quiet race. "As soon as I got in the car, it was just yellow flag after yellow flag," said the Dane. "I sat behind the safety car for most of my stint. Up until that point, it was a rather boring race, but that changed about 30 seconds after I got out. We are here to win and that fact that our only competitor is our team-mates doesn't make it any easier. Today's race showed everyone we're not just parading around."
After struggling in practice and qualifying, the #4 Corvette was on the pace in Saturday's race.
"We had a very good car, which is a testament to our engineer Steve Cole and crew chief Mike West, who both worked tirelessly," said Gavin. "We had a problem on Thursday and Friday, and we could only start tuning the car this morning in warm-up. The direction that Steve went with the car was very good."
"My stint was very fragmented – it never really got going and we spent a lot of time circulating behind the pace car," Gavin continued. "It was unbelievably hard on the restarts because the smoothness of the track doesn't clean the pickup off the tires properly. For the first four or five laps after a yellow, you have to tiptoe around."
With their Mid-Ohio victory, O'Connell and Magnussen increased their lead in the GT1 drivers' championship to 16 points (126-110) with five races remaining.
