GTP — it’s a name that is designed to reflect the past while looking to the future. The past was a time when the likes of Porsche, Jaguar, Nissan and Toyota dueled it out on America’s great racetracks and a few city streets. But there were also chassis from Spice or Intrepid mated to Chevrolet and Cosworth engines.
Where today we have drivers the likes of Filipe Albuquerque, Tom Blomqvist, Colin Braun, Sebastien Bourdais, Connor de Phillippi, Pipo Derani, Mathieu Jaminet, Felipe Nasr, Ricky Taylor, Renger van der Zande, back then it was Derek Bell, Geoff Brabham, Juan Manuel Fangio II, Al Holbert, Chip Robinson … and let’s not forget Bobby Rahal and Wayne Taylor.
Yes, two of IMSA’s current GTP team owners were there for the original GTP, which had its last race in October of 1993 at Portland International Raceway. The original GTP had lasted for 12 years. Thirty years after its demise in favor of the World Sports Car formula, GTP was reborn in IMSA’s WeatherTech SportsCar Championship comprised of LMDh cars and, should they choose to join, FIA Hypercars. How do they compare, and is the current battle of Acura vs. BMW vs. Cadillac vs. Porsche worthy of the GTP name?
“They’re, relatively speaking, the most sophisticated [sports racing cars] just as the old GTP cars were,” says Rahal. “The cars were much simpler than they are today, but just the fact that they were very exciting cars to watch, and exciting cars to drive. Fast, obviously. Great names like Porsche, Jaguar, March — it wasn’t obviously a production car manufacturer, but still produced great race cars. It was just an exciting time, back in the ’80s, with GTP. And here we are, 30, 40 years later, and resurrected the class again. The fans certainly love them, because they’re very dynamic cars to watch. Aside from that, they look right, they’re fast, they tick all the boxes — very similar to what the the original GTP cars did.”
Rahal may have cemented his reputation as one of America’s great racing drivers in Indy cars, where he won three CART championships and the 1986 Indianapolis 500. But after his fledgling open-wheel career, and before and during his IndyCar years, he raced sports cars to great effect, including stints in Can-Am, GT and culminating in GTP. Since 2008 he has been BMW’s partner in IMSA, with the Z4, M6 and M8 GT3 and GTLM cars, and now the M Hybrid V8 GTP cars. The Nos. 24 and 25 are campaigned full time by Philip Eng/Augusto Farfus and Connor de Phillippi/Nick Yelloly.
Wayne Taylor, on the other hand, has made his fame in sports car racing, first as a driver and now team principal of Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti Autosport, which fields the No. 10 Acura ARX-06 for son Ricky Taylor and Filipe Albuquerque. Most of his success as a driver, including a pair of championships, came during the World Sports Car era. However he had many years in GTP cars, most notably the Intrepid RM-1 Chevrolet, in which he scored the only victory for the car in New Orleans. If there’s one glaring omission for Taylor from the original GTP era to today, it’s the fact that a car like the Intrepid couldn’t exist in the modern world of factory-supported prototype racing.
“But then again, you couldn’t make this happen then, right?” he says of the current LMDh cars. “Now with the amount of technology and aerodynamics, these cars are clearly better cars than those cars were. But if you think that was, what, 1991 — some 30 years ago — to do the speeds that we did in those cars, compared to today is pretty amazing.”
The original GTP was mostly privateers until Nissan with Electramotive and Toyota with Dan Gurney’s All American Racers began dominating with factory efforts — the thing that effectively killed the class, along with GTP-similar Group C fading in the FIA World Sports Car Championship. Today all but JDC-Miller Motorsports and, soon, Proton Competition, are factory-backed teams.
“There really weren’t factories involved in the ’80s, until probably the Electramotive showed up, and that was clearly funded by Nissan,” notes Rahal. “And, of course, then Toyota came in with Gurney, same thing. Those were factory efforts similar to what we’re doing with BMW and Wayne and Mike [Shank] are doing with Acura, and now we’re factory efforts. And, you know, that kind of killed IMSA originally, because there was maybe only one or two factories involved, but now you’ve got five or six.
“I know, they’re supposed to be able to be run by privateers and what have you, but knowing what I know about these cars… it’s a very different level of expectation now, because of the complexity and the fact that the factories are actually designing and building these cars. We have BoP now, which we never had back in those days. And I’d love to see a series without BoP but I guess that’s just not going to happen anytime soon. So that just comes down to hoping that the regulators are able to rule fairly and ensure that there is competition within the category. But for the first year, I think GTP has been unqualified success.”
Both men tasted success in the original GTP era, although neither claimed a championship during the period. While most of Taylor’s success as a driver came in the World Sports Car era that followed, he looks back on the GTP days, and especially the Intrepid, as a great — if dangerous — time.
“The intrepid was a very special racing car,” Taylor remembers. “It had over 750 horsepower normally aspirated. It had 4000 pounds of downforce on the nose at 150mph. At Lime Rock through Big Bend, you could literally go flat through there. Because of the G forces, I remember that we had to strap our legs up, me and Tommy Kendall, because we physically couldn’t hold our legs up because of the speed.
“But in those days, we had no telemetry, we had no track overlays, we had no electronics. Although when we were doing it at the time, we thought, ‘Wow, this is like really modern stuff,’ you know. But now, when I look back, compared to what my sons are driving today, it’s so, so different. And so much more input comes from the driver — the driver has many more tools inside the cars to make them faster and make them do different things for them. Whereas in our day, you know, we had a steering wheel (and) a gear lever. We had no paddle shifters, we had no HANS devices, we had no no-lift shifts. And the engineers and the mechanics had to believe what we told them. Today you can’t just tell them you’re flat through that corner … they look on the computer and they can see, ‘Well, no, he’s talking BS.’”
Rahal’s best GTP moments came in what is arguably his best season as a race driver, 1987. A victory at in the Twelve Hours of Sebring, plus wins in his hometown and at his home track, coupled with his second of three Indy Car Series titles, made it a most memorable year.
“Winning Sebring in ’87 with Jochen Mass in the 962 Porsche, which was a fantastic race car,” he recalls. “In ’87 I did five IMSA races and I won three of them and I was second in the other two. So winning in Columbus, winning at Mid Ohio … that was a special year, special season, special summer, because in ’87, I also won my second IndyCar championship. So we won a lot of races that year, and three of them in the 962. That was just a wonderful car to drive and Bayside Disposal was a great team, good people.”
The original GTP era, as Taylor notes, is one to remember: “It was certainly an era that people won’t forget, because there were some beautiful cars. Racing against Geoff Brabham and Chip Robinson I remember was fantastic. We had a lot of great fun together racing against the Toyotas, Dan Gurney’s All American Eagles. It was really good racing.”
The first four races of the 2023 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship — with four different winners across three marques — suggest that this era of GTP, as different as it is from the first, may be remembered just as fondly.
