So often when you read about IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship driver Bill Auberlen, the word “veteran” is attached. It doesn’t bother Auberlen. He knows he’s 50 -- he can read a calendar.

But the fire still burns as hot as ever. He has kept himself in excellent shape, and every IMSA track is as familiar to him as the road home. He is under contract to BMW, and has been for years, so he knows the cars and the people.

This drive has led Auberlen to 59 wins, the last coming July 7 at the Mobil 1 Sports Car Grand Prix at Canadian Tire Motorsports Park in Ontario, one of the toughest venues on the circuit. He and co-driver Robby Foley followed that up with a surprising third-place finish July 20 at the little 1.5-mile Lime Rock Park in Connecticut -- surprising since his IMSA GT Daytona No. 96 Turner Motorsport/LMC Contractors BMW M6 GT3 favors bigger, faster tracks.

Like, for example, the 4-mile Road America in Wisconsin -- which just happens to be next on the schedule.

A win there would make 60 for Auberlen, tying him for the record, currently the property of 59-year-old Scott Pruett. But Pruett retired after the 2018 Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona, and Auberlen has no intention of hanging up his helmet anytime soon.

That said, he knows wins don’t come easily in the tough GT Daytona class, with invariably the largest field of the four IMSA classes. Of the 35 entries in the Road America race, 15 are GT Daytona cars, which are essentially held to the global GT3 specifications.

And then there’s the BoP, or Balance of Performance, where IMSA adds or subtracts weight, fuel capacity, engine inlet size, aerodynamics or refueling speed to slow down or speed up the cars as the sanctioning body sees fit, to maintain a level playing field.

Indeed, Auberlen says, after the win in Ontario, “We got hit with the BoP, so we’re down on horsepower from where we were. We just have to do the best we can.”

He agrees that IMSA is doing a far better job of implementing the BoP than in past years, a process that began with a series official holding a stopwatch. “It’s no longer up to one person to make a decision based on what he sees or feels,” Auberlen says. Detailed information is now fed into a computer. “Nobody is complaining much,” he says. “You get hit if you go too fast, you get help if you go two percent too slow. It’s fair.”

There were no changes made to BMW after Lime Rock, but three other cars were affected -- the Ferrari 488 GTE and McLaren 720S GT3 received weight reductions and horsepower increases to speed them up, while the Acura NSX GT3 Evo got a weight penalty to slow it down. No changes were specified for the Porsche 911 GT3 R, which won its class at Lime Rock.

Auberlen is excited about his return full-time to Turner Motorsports -- he and team owner Will Turner have had a long and very successful relationship in multiple series over the years, and he is also high on his co-driver, Robbie Foley, who just turned 23. “Robby is like a sponge -- he listens to everything we tell him, and he just soaks it up. All he wants to do is learn, but technically, he’s already right there.” While the race at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park was Auberlen’s 59th series win, it was Foley’s first. Auberlen and Foley are now second in points, 30 behind Mario Farnbacher and Trent Hindman, drivers of the No. 86 Meyer Shank Racing Acura.

While Auberlen loves the current IMSA class structure and the GT3-based class he’s racing in now, he is sentimental about the way things were. “You always miss the old days,” he says. “You brought the car to the track, and if it wasn’t fast enough, you took it back to the shop and made it go faster.” Now, the rules are so tightly drawn and enforced that mechanical creativity is no longer appreciated, much less legal. “I did like the rawness of the way it was before,” he says, “but the cream still always rises to the top.”

Is Auberlen, at 50, the same driver he was at, say, 25? “I wish I knew the answer to that,” he says. “I feel like I’m just as fast. I’ve cleared my life to revolve only around racing. I still have the passion, I wear the same size driver’s suit I have always worn, and I’m in the same physical shape. And I’m committed as ever. When you are younger, you don’t appreciate what you have, you don’t understand where you’re sitting. After all the wins, and all the challenges, I think I appreciate them even more.”

What he’d appreciate this weekend is one more win to tie Pruett, then one more to take the record. With three wins already at Road America, don’t bet against him.

The two-hour, 40-minute IMSA Road Race Showcase is scheduled for Sunday at 2:35 p.m. ET and can be streamed live on the NBC Sports App and on NBCSports.com.

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