Two sides of sports cars

Sports car racing’s big challenge has always been to achieve a level playing field for both factory and independent teams, a rare balance no sanctioning body has ever been able to strike for anything more than a few years. In America, IMSA ruled sports car racing for almost 20 years until it imploded amid domination by Toyota. Run by former SCCA man John Bishop, IMSA operated quite effectively during the heyday of the Porsche 962, which provided plenty of teams with a high-quality, competitive car. Ultimately, however, US-based factory efforts from Jaguar, Nissan and Toyota upset the applecart.

IMSA (International Motor Sports Association) went out of business at the end of 1993 and following various attempts to rebuild itself, a pair of competing series emerged in 1999 known as the American Le Mans Series and Grand-Am. Essentially, the ALMS has a more open rulebook and is predicated on an equivalency formula which the ALMS has so far been able to manage reasonably well. In the end, the ALMS caters primarily to factory or factory-backed teams. On the other hand, Grand-Am is much more restrictive and its Daytona Prototype formula is modelled on the NASCAR concept. It’s not a spec car formula, but appears that way to the uneducated eye. There’s competition between chassis and engine manufacturers, but all the teams are either independents or privateers.

The ALMS is owned by Don Panoz and based at his road and race car building facility near Road Atlanta in Georgia. Scott Atherton runs the ALMS for Panoz and the overall operation includes IMSA, which functions as the sanctioning body. IMSA is run by Teddy Mayer’s son, Tim. Grand-Am is owned by the France family and led by NASCAR’s vice-chairman Jim France, who is also the CEO of the International Speedway Corporation (ISC), the publicly-traded company that owns Daytona, Talladega, Watkins Glen and 10 other tracks across the USA. Roger Edmondson is the president of Grand-Am, which is based at Daytona Beach in company with NASCAR and ISC. Starting in 2009, Grand-Am officially becomes a NASCAR-sanctioned series.

Audi dominated the ALMS for many years, first with its twin-turbo R8 LMP1 Le Mans sports cars and more recently with its ground-breaking turbo-diesel R10. Audi won the P1 championship again in 2008 with Lucas Luhr/Marco Werner who won six races, while Allan McNish, Emanuele Pirro and Dindo Capello added a superb seventh win in the Petit Le Mans event at Road Atlanta in October.

But some serious Audi challengers have arrived over the past three years, starting in 2006 with a team of Penske/Porsche RS Spyder LMP2 cars. Porsche signed a three-year agreement with Penske and the combination has come on strong over the past two years using their lighter weight and better fuel mileage to beat the Audis in some races. The Penske/Porsche team started the ’08 season on a high note, winning the Sebring 12 Hours outright with Romain Dumas/Timo Bernhard/Emmanuel Collard, and Dumas/Bernhard took the P2 drivers’ championship for the second year in a row. But Penske moves to the Grand-Am series in ’09, where he’s expected to run a pair of Porsche-powered Rileys. Rob Dyson also ran a pair of Porsche Spyders and will stay in the ALMS, but switch to a Lola-Mazda for the new season.

Honda entered the ALMS in 2007 with its Acura brand, running three P2 cars with three teams – Andretti-Green, Fernández Racing and Highcroft Racing. A fourth Acura team, run by owner/driver Gil de Ferran, joined the party this year. Acura’s teams were very competitive in 2008, with Duncan Dayton’s Highcroft team scoring two outright and four class wins thanks to some superb driving by David Brabham. But Brabham’s co-driver Scott Sharp threw away their P2 title hopes by crashing in practice for Petit Le Mans in October and hitting the barrier again in the early laps of the race. Andretti-Green’s Acura P2 car was also healthily competitive in many races and won the Detroit/Belle Isle race outright driven by Franck Montagny and James Rossiter, the pair leading a one-two-three overall sweep for the Acura marque.

Acura moves up to P1 in 2009 with a twin-turbo V8 engine built by Honda Performance Development in California and a chassis designed by Wirth Engineering in Oxfordshire. Testing starts in December. It will be raced in 2009 by de Ferran’s team and Highcroft.

The 2008 Grand-Am championship was won by Scott Pruett and Memo Rojas aboard Chip Ganassi’s Riley-Lexus. Pruett is a wily veteran who took his second Grand-Am championship, while Ganassi’s team enjoyed its third title in the past five years. Ganassi’s team has also won Grand-Am’s season-opening Rolex 24 at Daytona the last three years. Second in the ’08 Grand-Am championship were Alex Gurney and Jon Fogarty, co-driving Bob Stallings’s Riley-Pontiac. Gurney and Fogarty were the defending champions, winning seven races in ’07. They were equally competitive in ’08 but not quite as effective.

Thanks to a tight rules package Grand-Am produces close racing and more depth of field than the ALMS. Dallara and Lola have built cars to challenge the dominant Riley, while Lexus, Pontiac, Ford and Porsche supply engines. Wayne Taylor’s Dallara-Pontiac driven by former champion Max Angelelli and Michael Valiante had a disappointing year, and will very likely switch to Ford engines in ’09 as Pontiac cuts back. Gurney and Fogarty in Bob Stallings’s car will be the only factory-backed Pontiac effort in the forthcoming season.

Grand-Am’s new season kicks off at the end of January with the Rolex 24 at Daytona and the race is sure to be a cracker. Ganassi’s powerhouse team will be hard to beat, with two cars and star drivers including Juan Pablo Montoya, Dario Franchitti and Scott Dixon. But with plenty of other good teams and drivers competing it’s likely to be a close battle all the way, as it has been in recent years. Sebring seven weeks later should be equally interesting and exciting, with the prospect of another Audi versus Peugeot Le Mans tune-up and the debut of the new Acura P1 car.

But I can’t help thinking what a tremendous launch pad American sports car racing would enjoy each year if these two long-distance classics were part of a combined series featuring the same drivers, cars and teams. Unfortunately of course, given the opposing power bases and respective strengths of the two series, that dream is unlikely to happen. We’ll just have to continue enjoying both series for what they are.