IMSA Season Kicks Off With Tremendous Storylines In Rolex 24 At Daytona

Business is booming for the Imsa WeatherTech Sports Car Series as it kicks off the 2023 international racing season with the famed Rolex 24 at Daytona.

Imsa is the International Motor Sports Association, the top-tier of Sports Car racing in North America.

Many of the top racing drivers from around the world will begin their quest for one of Sports Car racing’s biggest challenges, a 24-hour race at Daytona International Speedway. A 61-car field will take the green flag at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, January 28.

The checkered flag will drop 24 hours later and the winning teams from each class will have the unique honor of beating the competition and the clock. The winning drivers receive the cherished Rolex Daytona Chronograph watch, emblematic of the tremendous accomplishment.

It’s North America’s equal to the famed 24 Hours of Le Mans, held every June in Le Mans, France.

“If you rewind the clock 61 years ago, Bill France had a vision of this event and that was to really bring the best of the best together,” Imsa President John Doonan told me in an exclusive interview. “You are going to see the best racing drivers from many different disciplines in the race. Obviously, the best Sports Car drivers in the world but you have drivers coming from IndyCar, Nascar including Austin Cindric, last year’s Daytona 500 winner.

“You will also see the world’s leading auto manufacturers involved with the race teams that include race winners and champions.

“Add it all up and it’s the best of the best. We are ready to write that next chapter this weekend.”

The Launch Of A New Season

The Rolex 24 at Daytona is the launchpad for racing around the world. It kicks off big-time racing in January as every other major form of racing begins its season after the Rolex 24.

Doonan has plenty to emphasize, especially from a business standpoint as 18 automotive manufacturers will be represented in all Imsa’s classes at Daytona.

That’s an incredible amount of manufacturer support, especially considering the Nascar Cup Series features three automakers in Ford, Chevrolet, and Toyota. IndyCar has two engine partners with Chevrolet and Honda.

In many racing series, the rules are restricted and controlled for competitive and economic reasons.

Imsa encourages innovation and engineering by showcasing the technology that is available to the manufacturers.

That includes what Imsa is billing as “The Next Big Thing.” It’s the Grand Touring Prototype (GTP) Class, featuring hybrid-powered prototype race cars that will make its debut in the “twice around the clock” endurance battle.

All the cars in GTP are all cars built to LMPh technical specifications, which also meets specifications for competing at Le Mans. There are also LMH technical specifications, which would be eligible to race this year at Daytona but are not in this year’s field.

Four manufacturers – Acura, BMW, Cadillac, and Porsche – already have committed and will be on the grid for that first race. Another manufacturer, Lamborghini, will join the series in 2024, with the potential for even more to come.

The GTP Class is a collaboration between IMSA and the Automobile Club de l’Ouest (ACO). The two organizations worked together to establish a new set of technical regulations – Le Mans Daytona h (LMPh) – that enable manufacturers to develop highly advanced prototype race cars at a fraction of the cost of previous top-tier programs.

In addition, a historic convergence agreement between Imsa and the ACO will enable these prototypes to compete for overall victories in endurance racing’s crown jewel events such as the Rolex 24 At Daytona, 24 Hours of Le Mans, and Twelve Hours of Sebring among others.

“The core values of Imsa are pretty simple,” Doonan explained. “We want to remain cost effective. Racing is an expensive sport. But we 100 percent want to be an automotive industry marketing tool. We have built very deep relationships with all the

auto manufacturers that choose to race with us. We have asked them directly about all their objectives. We want to help them meet and exceed those objectives.”

To achieve that, Doonan emphasized Imsa wants to listen to the manufacturer, to be a tool in their toolbox.

That includes an understanding of the manufacturers’ objectives regarding power trains and how it relates to their road cars. Also, the vision for alternative fuels and propulsion including hybrid and the advancement toward electrification and alternative fuels.

“We want to continue to be the stage where these auto manufacturers compete,” Doonan said. “We are so proud they have chosen to compete at the highest levels of Sports Car racing in the world.”

Reigniting the GTP Class

In 2023, there are 11 Imsa races with six events that feature all five classes including GTP. It’s a category that started in Imsa in 1981 and continued for the next 12 years.

Over the years, it was replaced by different classes, but GTP was reignited beginning this year.

“The GTP aspect is there is freedom in the design,” Doonan explained. “The designers that design road cars that you see on the street every day, this same group at Acura, BMW, Cadillac, Porsche and next year Lamborghini will be joining us. They were given an open pallet on the easel to design the ultimate expression of their brand.

“When you see the Acura, BMW, Cadillac, and Porsche GTP cars, you can see their brand in the design. It could be the way the nose looks, the headlights, the styling along the side of the car or the tail or the rear wing, they represent their brand. If you pull the road car version of those brands against the race cars, you can see it in the design.

“The young men and women in these design studios were given the ultimate homework assignment. They embraced it. They were proud of it and as the cars roll off the grid for the Rolex 24 on Saturday, you will see pride in what they achieved and representative of their automaker.”

The GTP Class will operate with a new set of technical rules for at least the next five years. It allows a high-tech platform that is relevant to the manufacturers’ electrification and sustainability initiatives, and relatively inexpensive.

The technical platform requires each car to use a single-source hybrid powertrain system and one of four approved chassis – greatly reducing or eliminating development costs for the manufacturer.

Those manufacturers can showcase their own unique internal combustion engine capabilities in race cars with identifiable styling tied directly to each manufacturer’s consumer product. And most of all, these cars will compete for overall victories in the world’s most prestigious endurance races and the substantial recognition that comes with it.

Imsa Sports Car racing and its rules that encourage engineering innovation has created all-important technology transfer between racing and the passenger car industry.

What is tested and confirmed on the race car can eventually be utilized with electronic sensors and other components in the passenger car market.

Brand Identity

Mark Crawford is the Large Project Leader for Honda Performance Development, which competes in IMSA with the Acura brand.

An Acura GTP from Meyer-Shank Racing won the pole for the Rolex 24 during qualifications last Sunday.

“It’s a validation of everything that so many people at HPD and American Honda and the Acura group can be proud of,” Crawford said. “So many people have put their hands on this project, it’s really rewarding to get the pole.”

Crawford said the comparison between the GTP, and the old DPi division includes completing new designs and parts. Everything that sits on four wheels is different, he explained.

“Put it together and it looks very similar, but shockingly, nothing is similar between the DPi and the LMPh car,” Crawford said. “The styling is all new with some cleaner lines. The DPi car was a good-looking car, but the designers took a big step up on this car and made it look even better.

“The fans might notice a few different exhaust notes with a higher-revving twin-turbo V6. There is a lot of opportunity for development with this new car. The opportunity

that Imsa has provided with this formula is really second to none. There are a lot of racing series that have frozen development, but Imsa has really given us a clean sheet. To put our technology to it with our controls and bring the Acura experience to the pinnacle of motorsports is a huge opportunity.”

Every LMPh race car will use a hybrid powertrain system that includes a Bosch Motor Generator Unit (MGU) along with batteries developed and provided by Williams Advanced Engineering and a gearbox from Xtrac. The hybrid powertrain supplements the manufacturer’s internal combustion engine (ICE) with a combined output of 500 kilowatts (approximately 670 horsepower) as measured at the rear axle.

On the ICE (internal combustion engine) front, each manufacturer has freedom to choose its own desired powerplant. Acura has elected to go with a smaller-displacement, twin-turbocharged V6 engine, while Cadillac is using a larger-displacement, normally aspirated V8. Both BMW and Porsche will use twin turbocharged V8 engines, as will Lamborghini when it debuts in 2024.

Strategic Change

The combination of the two have changed the strategy on managing fuel during the 24-hour race.

“It’s not a tank of fuel anymore, it’s a virtual fuel tank and the car fuel in addition to the energy you spend,” Chip Ganassi Racing Director of Operations Mike O’Gara explained. “It’s figuring out what’s the best use of deploying the hybrid power with the ICE engine. There is refueling time that must be factored in, so I think you’ll see from many teams long runs to figure out energy per stint and the best combination.

“It’s no longer a knob for fuel trims. It’s a few knobs, a couple of switches and many a paddle or two that affect all it. We’re leaning every time that car leaves the pit box.”

GM sports car racing program manager Laura Wontrop Klauser oversees the Cadillac Imsa program and has successfully created a “One Team” approach by bringing Chip Ganassi Racing and Action Performance to collaborate. In the past, that was nearly unthinkable.

“If we try to be off on different islands, we would be unable to compete once we got to the Rolex,” Wontrop Klauser explained. “We had to work together. We had to swap parts back and forth to make sure cars were running. We had to share learnings and, I think, necessity can be the best tool that you can have in your toolbox because there really was no other option to get this program done than to collaborate.

“That has driven the message, and what I think has been great is seeing the results of the collaboration, seeing the ability to get the test program more done by having the two teams helping us and running two cars instead of running one car. The benefits are coming in. We still have a huge mountain to climb and constantly pushing that rock up the hill.

“Thankfully, we’re all rallying behind the rock together – depending on which rock we’re pushing that day. So, it’s nice to have people standing next to your right and left while you’re trying to do something incredible.”

From a technical standpoint, the switch from DPi to LMPh has been challenging from an engineering standpoint.

Meeting Engineering Challenges

But that is what engineers do by taking a challenge and discovering a solution.

“The sheer amount of code and software that has been written to run this car is daunting,” Wontrop Klauser said. “We cannot have enough software engineers working right now because everything on the car is connected. Things that we never had to worry about influencing each other in the past with the DPi or other race programs, now if one thing is slightly off it’s not going to run or turn or brake or whatever it needs to do.

“The importance of making sure that all the calibrations are correct and then the safety critical component of that to make sure that everything is correct is huge. Working through all of that has probably been the biggest mountain once we had all the parts on the car to test. This whole program has been a challenge.”

For individuals such as Doonan and Crawford, the Rolex 24 is more like the Rolex 48. They arrive at the track early Saturday morning and are on duty for the remainder of the 24-hour race. It doesn’t conclude at the checkered flag, however, because there is the end of the race technical inspection and teardown before heading back to the hotel or in Doonan’s case, residence, Sunday night, nearly 48 hours later.

Afterwards, it will be on to the rest of the season, as the Rolex 24 at Daytona is the official green flag for auto racing around the world.