Mike Shank sounded whole for the first time in just over a year. On Monday and Tuesday at Sebring International Raceway, 12 months and 21 days after its last IMSA action, Meyer Shank Racing made its return to IMSA’s WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, a series it never wanted to leave, in a private test that held great significance for Shank and co-owner Jim Meyer.
MSR won on its last time out, taking victory at Motul Petit Le Mans on Oct. 14, 2023. After the checkered flag waved, MSR handed off its factory Acura ARX-06 hybrid GTPs to Wayne Taylor Racing, ending 20 years of continuous participation in Grand Am Rolex Series and IMSA competition. But with WTR’s recent departure from Acura at the end of the most recent running of Petit Le Mans and a reversal of fortune — WTR handing Acuras back to MSR after the race — as Honda Racing Corporation US re-signed MSR brand’s lone manufacturer team in 2025, a sense of normalcy and order was restored.
“It was really, really great,” Shank told RACER. “We purposely left it low key; we didn’t invite anybody to come see it because we just wanted to get our stuff back together. It’s the first outing for the whole group, working together, 90 people there between HRC and MSR, and we ran through so much stuff.”
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The test was the first of its kind for MSR and HRC. In previous factory Acura IMSA DPi and GTP programs, HRC relied on its partner teams to run its cars with full and dedicated engineering staffs supplied by the WTRs and MSRs. But under the new arrangement with MSR, the Ohio-based team will supply crew and engineers for its No. 60 ARX-06, and with the No. 93 ARX-06, MSR is responsible for the mechanical side — the crew looking after all aspects of preparing and fielding the car — while HRC brings its own engineers to handle the performance side of operating the No. 93.
At Sebring, the blended team took its first steps in running cars together — including the shaking down of a new ARX-06 chassis — in preparation for next week’s visit to Daytona International Speedway for a three-day Balance of Performance test led by IMSA to set the technical specification for each WeatherTech Championship model for January’s Rolex 24 At Daytona.
“One car was new, and we have three running cars currently,” Shank said. “It was just a good day for everyone to get to know each other and get the communication channels going, which is really good. I was just really, really pleased with it. You know, we’re only a few weeks after Petit, just got the cars, and it was a Herculean effort to get ready for Sebring, which went really well. So the idea was that we get this together now to be ready for Daytona test, and hopefully, get back there in January with guns blazing and being able to hit that pretty hard.”
The MSR team was a big part of helping HRC and Acura to prepare the ARX-06 for its debut in 2023 and was the manufacturer’s most competitive team. Having missed the second season of GTP action, where all of the cars took major steps forward, Shank was concerned about having a large learning curve to overcome when the factory deal came back to MSR, but after two days at Sebring, those fears have been allayed.
“Actually, it felt very familiar,” he said. “We engaged my top five or six technical people who started working on the project five or six months ago, and we were kind of brought into the loop of where Acura was at, currently. So when we hit the ground running, we had a bunch of systems in place. It wasn’t as big of a shock to the system as I suspected it might be. All due credit to the new head of engineering for me, Vincent Forges — a guy that’s been with me for nine years. He really is just taking this program on our side of it and making sure that we were ready to roll, technically.
“The integration with HRC, with both cars, it’s been really interesting. It’s a new kind of model and we’re learning as we go. But it doesn’t feel like we missed a whole year. I know that sounds arrogant, but we hit the ground running. We had a lot of on-track time, the cars ran fine, virtually no issues. And, man, I was super proud of what everybody did.”