Tag: GTP

Can you name the last time neither a Cadillac nor an Acura were on the podium of an IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship race? After Saturday’s Porsche-BMW-Porsche result at the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach, I asked that question myself, and it turns out the answer is 2016, before the beginning of the DPi era. This result has been a long time coming.

The satisfaction of Saturday’s result comes not in the failure of those stalwart competitors who have stuck with the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and whose immediate commitment to the LMDh formula that makes up the Grand Touring Prototype class was a big boost to the idea, but rather the diversity of competition. And let’s be clear, Acura has clearly built the best-out-of-the-box GTP car in the ARX-06, and Wayne Taylor Racing should have won on Saturday. But in three races, there have been three different manufacturers on the winner’s roster, and had things gone a little differently at Long Beach, it could even have been a BMW victory. While it seemed nearly impossible at Daytona, it’s likely there will be a BMW M Team RLL M Hybrid V8 win before the end of the season.

Four manufacturers that are each capable of winning on any weekend, run by world-class teams with some of the best sports car drivers on the planet. That’s a promise fulfilled. Even if the promise was unspoken, when IMSA chose to bring back the GTP name, it was implied. Harkening back to the days of the Porsche 962s, the Jaguar XJRs, the Nissan GTP ZX-Turbo, and the all-conquering Eagle Toyotas was no accident. It was an era of intense manufacturer-based competition, where anyone could win, and did — even Wayne Taylor in a Chevrolet Intrepid. True, there were periods of domination, but there were more periods with a variety of teams and manufacturers winning each weekend. It was the era that sparked my love of sports car racing and captured the imaginations of many.

BMW and Porsche have some catching up to do in order to match Acura and Cadillac on outright pace, but the gap seems to be closing quickly. Porsche Penske Motorsports won on clever strategy, with help from misfortune and error on the part of some of the key competitors. An error-free run by WTR would have brought almost certain victory. But a win is a win, and sometimes the winner is just the one that makes the fewest mistakes and has the least trouble.

While Ricky Taylor going full-send in the closing laps of the Long Beach race wrecked WTR’s Acura — for the second race in a row after Filipe Albuquerque did the same toward the end of the Twelve Hours of Sebring — and did some damage to WTR’s title chances, it also demonstrates the importance of victory to these drivers and teams. While they may play the points game later in the season, right now it’s about standing on top of the podium. Winning is paramount.

There is part of the promise of GTP unsatisfied, however. While convergence between LMDh and Hypercar is playing out in the World Endurance Championship, where on Sunday the podium for the 6 Hours of Portimao was Toyota GR010 Hybrid Hypercar, Ferrari 499P Hypercar and Porsche 963 LMDh, that hasn’t yet come to fruition in the WeatherTech Championship. But it’s likely the call of competing in the U.S. will prove alluring to the likes of Toyota and Ferrari.

Could we see 15 or more GTP cars at the 2024 Rolex 24 At Daytona? Yes, that’s a real possibility, with Acura, BMW, Cadillac, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche and Toyota all lining up, and perhaps even Peugeot and Alpine running as other brands their parent companies sell in the North American market. It’s an exciting proposition.

GTP is already fulfilling some of its promises. We can’t wait for its full potential to be realized.

With 36 hours of competition in the books, drivers are getting a pretty good handle on the new Grand Touring Prototype (GTP) cars in the top class of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. As the series heads into a couple of sprint races before the Le Mans break, everyone is gathering a pretty good picture of how the cars perform. Performance all alone, though, is one thing; how the cars actually race each other is quite another.

“I feel it’s hard to overtake,” says Renger van der Zande, driver of the No. 01 Cadillac Racing V-Series.R from Chip Ganassi Racing. “The speeds are higher but we have to brake a bit earlier and the weight is higher as well. The minimum speed [in the corner] is quite a lot lower so you cannot really rely on, ‘Let’s break super late and dive bomb someone.’ I think if you dive bomb someone you’re going straight — you’re going to miss the corner. I think with the DPi you could actually overtake someone on track because you had a bit more downforce, you had a bit more minimum speed and grip to get away with a mistake. With these cars, it seems like if you try to outbrake, you actually are going outbrake yourself and going off the track, so you have to be a bit more careful.”

Adds van der Zande’s teammate, Sebastien Bourdais: “I think it’s a little bit harder to follow really closely. These cars just seem to rely a lot on the little downforce that they have, which which kind of surprised me a bit. But we still have seen some passes and some good shows.”

Indeed, the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring was a good show… until it wasn’t. There was close competition, drivers trying to use traffic to gain or keep an advantage, and a little bumping and banging. Sebring demonstrated that the gap between cars, and the clear advantage that some cars had on certain tracks, may be a thing of the past. For example, Sebring and Long Beach were expected to be Cadillac tracks in recent years, with the Acuras doing better on smoother circuits where ride height wasn’t as much of a factor. Drivers on both sides feel that difference is now either non-existent, or at least greatly reduced.

That could lead to closer racing, especially now that Porsche seems to have caught up with Acura and Cadillac, with BMW not far behind. And close racing on the streets of Long Beach usually means contact. Can the GTP cars take it as well as the DPi machines did?

“I think it’s pretty similar to what it used to be,” declares Bourdais. “Obviously, we don’t have much experience knowing what the car can withstand as far as side-to-side contact. But you take maybe less risk now with fewer little appendages to fly off the car, because they’re more clean, there’s less of them around the GTP. As far as suspension goes, I think it’s it’s at least as strong as the DPi.”

That was put to the test in the closing stages of Sebring, when the battle between the two Porsche Penske Motorsports 963s and the Wayne Taylor Racing Acura ARX-06 came to a head. Going off track as the GTP leaders tried to juke through GT traffic, Filipe Albuquerque slid across the Turn 3 apex in the No. 10 WTR Acura and collected Mathieu Jaminet’s No. 6 Porsche. The No. 7 Porsche, Felipe Nasr at the wheel, then hit them both.

“I can tell you one crazy thing: My car got wrecked twice,” says Albuquerque. “Front in first, and then second Porsche, heavily. They just changed the front uprights and the nose. It’s good to go. I think that shows how impressive those cars are.”

One thing that has brought in a new element isn’t necessarily the car’s themselves — although the way they get heat into new tires and wear the tires certainly plays a part — is the lower tire allocations. With teams having to double-stint tires more often, it brings an interesting dynamic between cars running a second stint on a set and cars on new rubber.

“As little fun as that might be for the driver, I think it does make the racing interesting,” explains Ricky Taylor, Albuquerque’s co-driver in the No. 10 WTR Acura. “At Sebring, a lot of people were off sequence with each other, double stinting when people were on their first stints. It made it very interesting, I think, at times. And when you have that little grip, it opens up some overtaking. I think for the show it was it was kind of entertaining.”

Due to the reduced downforce, when the GTP cars are on old tires, or cold tires, they can actually be slower than the GT cars. That can make traffic management on both sides a challenge, but with the GTPs having more power than their predecessors, the passes are usually quickly completed on the straights.

“They’ve lost a lot of performance in the slow-speed corners, and that’s quite noticeable, because that was already the type of corner where the DPI was massively different to us already,” says Ross Gunn, driver of the No. 23 Heart of Racing Aston Martin Vantage GT3 in GTD PRO. “And now they’re virtually the same minimum speed. So that definitely makes traffic management different — in some respects a bit more tricky. There are definitely ways, as a driver, you can drive around that and try and make sure that you’re making the most of every situation. But for sure, it’s a big learning process for us as much as as them.”

Corvette Racing driver Jordan Taylor relates an instance when one of the BMW M Hybrid V8 GTP cars came around him, but then was so slow in the corner, Jordan went back around the BMW in the No. 3 Corvette. So, he says, it makes a GT driver think about going a little defensive to keep from losing time in the corner. But others note that, except in that instance of a GTP on old tires, it make the traffic equation a bit easier.

“The old cars used to corner like they were on rails,” explains Bill Auberlen, driver of the No. 96 Turner Motorsport BMW M4 GT3. “So they would go around you in the center of corners, and they’d always put you in a bad position. Now, they almost never pass you in the corner because they’ve got their hands full as it is. And on their second stint, they’re actually slower than us in the corner, so they hold you up. So what that does is it makes it really nice — they go blasting by you on a straightaway where you want them to pass; once you get past the brakes zone they sort of tuck in behind you, wait, and then go blasting down the next straightaway. It actually makes interacting with them a lot easier.”

The greater power of the GTPs does have a downside, though — greater closing speed means an earlier decision on where to put the car.

“It is nice to be able to clear everybody in the straight,” says Ricky Taylor. “Although the closing speed is so high that there becomes a level of commitment when you’re going down the straight and [the GT cars] are in their own battle. You have to pick a side to go, and especially when there are Ams in the car — do they see you, do they not … you’re trying to read body language from a much further distance and then commit to one side, because the penalty of picking the wrong side and having to lift and and move across is actually higher.”

The GTP and GT drivers have now had the chance to witness the dynamic on two rather different circuits, and now head to a third variety in the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach next week. The street circuit has no really fast corners and only a couple of medium-speed turns, so it will be a completely new test for the drivers, but they’ll come away with more knowledge on how the new GTP cars race.