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Ricky Taylor on Le Mans: Lessons, Legacy, and the Loneliness of the Night Shift

May 19, 2026

For more than a century, the 24 Hours of Le Mans has stood as the ultimate test of endurance, precision, and resilience. Few American drivers understand that challenge as intimately as Ricky Taylor, who has made nine appearances at the legendary Circuit de la Sarthe since 2013. In a recent Evening With a Legend session, Taylor opened up about his earliest memories of the race, the cultural differences between IMSA and WEC, and the emotional weight of competing on motorsport’s biggest stage.

What emerged was a portrait of a driver shaped by family legacy, sharpened by global competition, and still hungry for the victory that has eluded him.

Taylor’s first exposure to Le Mans came long before he ever turned a lap there. In 2001, he traveled to France with his brother Jordan and their mother to watch their father, Wayne Taylor, compete in the Cadillac LMP900 program. “It was our first time to France… and our first Father’s Day together,” Ricky recalled. “The scale of the event was just shocking.” The chateau lodging, the logistics, the sheer size of the paddock — it all left a mark. Even the rivalries were memorable: as kids, the Taylors viewed Butch Leitzinger as “the enemy” simply because he kept winning.

Synopsis

This episode of Evening With A Legend features endurance driver Ricky Taylor talking about his Le Mans experiences, from attending in 2001 with his father (Wayne Taylor) to racing there from 2013 onward. Ricky describes the event’s scale, the track’s dusty first laps, narrow roads, tricky slow corners, night-time loneliness, and the WEC vs IMSA differences in culture, rules, and precision.

He explains Le Mans’ low-energy surface and long tire life, plus how top-level simulators and Michelin tire models aid preparation. Ricky also reviews Wayne Taylor Racing Cadillac’s recent Le Mans effort, including qualifying pace, missing Hyperpole, and an engine failure, and reflects on racing with his brother Jordan and teammate Filipe Albuquerque. He discusses Jackie Chan’s LMP2 program, LMP2’s competitiveness, Garage 56’s Camaro impact, Cadillac’s 2026 F1 plans, and goals to improve after a difficult season.

What was your first impression when you arrived at Le Mans and experienced the event’s scale and atmosphere compared to other endurance races?
How did racing at Le Mans differ from your experiences in IMSA, both in terms of competition and overall race dynamics?
Can you describe the feeling of driving through the night at Le Mans, especially on the Mulsanne Straight at top speed?
How did you prepare for the unique demands of a 24-hour race like Le Mans, both physically and mentally?
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced—either technical or mental—during your Le Mans campaigns?
Were there any memorable moments or turning points in your Le Mans appearances that still stand out to you today?
In your opinion – How can we get some more love for LMP-2 (seems to have the least amount of coverage on TV).
How does the teamwork dynamic differ when competing with an international crew or manufacturer on the global stage?
Having covered races in both prototype and GT categories, how did the different classes shape your experience and approach to the race?

Transcript

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] Evening With a Legend is a series of presentations exclusive to legends of the famous 24 hours of lamont giving us an opportunity to bring a piece of Le Mans to you. By sharing stories and highlights of the big event, you get a chance to become part of the Legend of Le Mans with guests from different eras of over 100 years of racing.

Crew Chief Eric: Tonight we have an opportunity to bring a piece of Le Mans to you sharing in the Legend of Le Mans with guests from different eras of over 100 years of racing. And as your host, I’m delighted to introduce. Ricky Taylor, one of America’s leading endurance talents. He has made nine appearances at the 24 hours of Le Manss since 2013, showcasing his precision, speed, and composure competing against some of the world’s best drivers in both [00:01:00] prototype and GT categories.

Known for his technical feedback and strategic awareness. He’s carried his ims a success to the global endurance scene consistently delivering competitive performances at Le Mans. Though victory has remained elusive. Ricky Taylor’s appearances at the fame circuit D Losar underscore his standing as a world-class endurance racer, capable of thriving under the immense pressure and complexity that defined the 24 Hour Classic.

And with that, I’m your host crew chief Eric from the Motoring Podcast Network, welcoming everyone to this evening with a legend. So Ricky, welcome to the show.

Ricky Taylor: Yeah, thank you very much. What a great intro. Thank you.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, like all good stories, there’s a superhero origin. So take us back to the mid two thousands and to your first time at Le Mans.

Tell us about your first impression when you got there, what the experience was like, the scale, the atmosphere compared to all the other endurance and sports car racing you’d been doing up until that point.

Ricky Taylor: That would be with my dad, I guess. So Jordan, mom and I all going over to watch Dad in 2001 with the second [00:02:00] iteration of the.

Olympian, 900 Cadillac, and I think it was our first time to France actually. So that was maybe a big part of it. Big memory was, wow, they stay in a chateau for a race weekend. And you know, there’s just so, so much goes into it. It wasn’t just, you know, we’d been to Daytona and Sebring and all the American races quite a few times, but it was such a different scale of a race weekend.

Just from the logistics of getting the team there to the amount of time that we noticed Dad was away for that one. I think that was our first Father’s Day together, because father’s day’s always around La MAs. So the big thing that jumped out to us was, was really the scale of the event and, uh, how many people put so much into it.

Crew Chief Eric: So that 2001 Cadillac, he would’ve raced with another legend we had on the show. He would’ve been there with Butch Leisinger, right?

Ricky Taylor: Yeah, that’s true. Butch Leisinger was in the other car. And Butch Leisinger was always the enemy. To the Taylor, to the Taylor kids because he was always winning. Whether he was with Dyson or Cadillac there, or Bentley, he was always such a strong competitor.

So until we met him, [00:03:00] Butch Leisinger was the enemy. And then once you meet him, he’s just the nicest person ever. And we became fans of his, obviously, but yeah. Yeah, he was in another, he was in the other Cadillac.

Crew Chief Eric: So fast forward a little bit from 2001 to 2013 ish to your first time at Le Mans. Your brother had already been there in 2012 racing for Corvette.

What was it like turning laps at Le Mans for the first time?

Ricky Taylor: Everybody talks about, you know, the challenge of the race track and there’s a few tracks around the world where people really put it on a different pedestal. Bathurst is one of them. Indianapolis is one of them, and Le Mans is one of them. I’d say those are three of the big ones.

You know, maybe, uh. Macau for Open Wheel Guys is a, is a big one. You really can’t give yourself perspective until you’ve been there. And I think the thing that’s important is to remember that it’s a street course and the first laps that you turn the track is incredibly dusty and it reminds you of, of the first laps at Detroit or Long Beach or any of those street courses where there’s dust flying and the trek has next to zero grip and you’re gaining [00:04:00] four or five seconds of lap.

As the track evolves and it was just a shock of, firstly the speed of the L MP one cars. I had mostly prototype experience where I’m not used to being passed and I was in A-G-T-E-M class car in the Corvette and seeing the l MP one in the big hybrid era days come by, but when I’m in first second gear coming out of, let’s say Mosan corner, and they’re already, you know, doing 180 miles per hour, uh, when the front hybrid kicks in.

So that was very eyeopening, a whole different sense of awareness. That I needed to have. And then moving to the race, it was classic Le Mansr completely soaking wet for basically 24 hours. I got my real taste of my first Le Mans and it’s sort of how it, how it goes there sometimes.

Crew Chief Eric: So had you done any racing in Europe before this point?

Ricky Taylor: I’d driven in Europe, test some things, but never raced. The only race I’d done outside of America was a go-kart race in Brazil and I did a V eight supercars race in Australia and that was it basically.

Crew Chief Eric: So having focused your career mostly in imsa, how do you compare [00:05:00] that experience at LA MA to everything you had learned Stateside, you know, driving in IMSA and A LMS and those programs?

Ricky Taylor: It’s definitely culturally different when you go to an IMSA race. Something as simple as the paddock layout, interestingly enough, can change the culture of the weekend. So we work out of trailers. The tents off the side of the truck and sort of a common eating area for everybody and it creates a really nice camaraderie between the teams and drivers.

And you see people and you talk and very warm feeling when you race in Europe or the whole we season, they’re out of garages and so they go from their hospitality to the garage, to the race car, and you never go outside of your little world. You never talk to anybody. It’s very business-minded. And that sort of translates to the on-track product as well.

SA is very raw and hard close racing with full course yellows. And the way that the racing is formatted by the rules lends itself to aggressive racing because you have to fight for track position, most importantly, where in whack it’s very pure. They don’t have as many [00:06:00] mechanisms to bring the field together.

And every second counts where, you know, you could say you’re racing hard in imsa, but you have to race really precisely in whack, and it’s very unforgiving. So a mistake that you make, an hour one at LA Mall, you may never get it back. Whether it was the single safety car era or the three safety car era or slow zones or whatever it is.

You really rarely get it back and we, so that makes it very challenging from that side.

Crew Chief Eric: Let’s talk a little bit more about the racing at Le Mans, especially at night. Everybody seems to be fascinated about what it’s like to drive and your, the way your brother described it was after a while cars drop out and DNF people space apart and pit strategies and pit cycles.

He was like, it feels like you’re driving. Down the highway to nowhere for a very long time. You end up being by yourself at night. Is that true? Even in the LMP two cars?

Ricky Taylor: Yeah, it is. One thing Ford versus Ferrari did well is like that sense of loneliness. I feel like although they were going down a much longer moan straight, that sense of just sort of being [00:07:00] alone, I think they captured that quite well.

I think you’re spot on there. You get into the rhythm at night and it does space out. And especially when you’re in the faster class and you see everybody see the GT cars coming and you get that bit of a rhythm going. And I, I guess, like I alluded to earlier, it’s a lot more like qualifying laps, you know, watching the fuel burn down.

You’re saving the tires in the first half of the stent and then you push a little bit more in the, as the fuel burns and you can use a bit of the tire, you settle into three, maybe four stints on a tire at a time, which. We never do in America. Uh, we may double stick once, but because Le Mans is such low energy trek, the tires last forever.

So that alone makes it quite not monotonous, but repetitive and sort of emphasizes, you know, doing a good job corner after corner, lap after lap.

Crew Chief Eric: What do you do to stay and focus? Do you have your engineer talking to you the whole time you listen to an audio book? What are you doing to stay awake?

Ricky Taylor: Yeah, I think luckily we’re all very competitively minded people, so there’s not only somebody to chase.

You may never catch them and the guy behind you may never catch you at the start of the race. Everybody’s [00:08:00] watching the TVs, everybody’s watching the timing. You’re fighting over little inches spaces here and there, and at night you kind of settle into the rhythm of I’m gonna do my turn good of a job as I can do, give it to the next guy.

And we’re just gonna sort of wind the clock down. But at the same time, obviously doing the best job you can, ’cause it counts, but it feels like you’re just kind of doing your turn sometimes. And so you’re putting the work in and, and trying to keep the car clean and safe.

Crew Chief Eric: So let’s take the veil of nighttime off of the lap.

And for those that watched the race religiously at home, like I’ve done for many, many, many years since I was a little kid, I didn’t have a really good perspective of the track until I got to do some VIP laps. It was surprisingly narrow and surprisingly tight. And some of those corners like aaj and Mosan are extremely slow.

Was that a shocker for you too? Is it always a surprise when you get there compared to the rhythm of some of the US tracks, like a Watkins Glen or a road Atlanta that have, you know, that natural terrain and, and that movement to them?

Ricky Taylor: And I’m glad you mentioned those two [00:09:00] corners because they are such slow speed corners and Lamont gets a reputation for being such a high speed track.

And that’s what makes those corners so difficult is ’cause you’re going so fast for so long, you lose a sense of. Speed. You rely a lot on your, on your references as far as you know, breaking references and things and where you are. I think back in the day before the chicanes, having that hump in the straight actually told them, okay, moan corner’s coming up.

But for us, we can see it much easier. But losing that sense of speed, I’d say you lose that sense of speed at Lamont more than other tracks. So it’s very easy to. Overshoot those low speed corners or just sort of misjudge the speed where I feel like usually drivers have a very good gauge for that, but it’s a little hard to sort of, I guess, calibrate that in there and you’ll see a lot of people go off in, in those two places.

Crew Chief Eric: I also found myself screaming at the television less. In the sense that it’s like, just pass him, just go on tv. It looks like it. There’s all the room in the world, but it’s actually, it’s a two lane country road. There really isn’t the space to make some of the maneuvers, you know, with the fisheye [00:10:00] lenses that we’re looking at the world through when we see it on the broadcast.

Ricky Taylor: Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting, you know, plank wear has been in the news in F1 recently, and we struggle with the same thing and the prototypes wearing the plank is, is. Critical part to, you know, performance. We wanna run the car low and for the drivers preserving that. And the unique thing about Le Mans is the road is very crowned.

So like you said, you, you’re yelling at people to go. And it’s funny, when you watch cars going down the straight, you won’t see a lot of three wide. And if they do go three wide, nobody picks the dead center of the road. The car is just high sided on the crown of the road. You know, a car will pick a lane and then somebody will go off the track, you know, into that sort of green runoff if they go through wide.

It’s kind of a funny game. Everybody knows what the good parts of the race track are and they try not to give that up. But like you kind of hinted, it sometimes changes the way that, that you race the track a little bit.

Crew Chief Eric: So when your brother was here, it was just before this year’s 24 hours of Le Mans, and he was talking about getting prepped and simulation time, and I think [00:11:00] you both were slated to do some time on the Sims.

So let’s talk a little bit more about how you guys prepare both mentally and physically for such a long race, whether it’s this one or Rolex for that matter.

Ricky Taylor: Yeah, I’d say mentally Le Mans is very difficult. Just back to the monotony of it, how much you have to get in the rhythm. So mentally you don’t have those guys to race all the time.

Where Daytona Sebring, you’re always racing somebody head to head, you know, on the track, and it’s just a constant battle. Where at Le Mans, that constant qualifying lap sort of mentality really wears you down. But to your question on preparation, I wouldn’t say that we do anything differently. Physically, mentally, you know, you might do a bit more sim work or I got a little sort of a game on my computer that works on focus and attention and I do that year round, but you know, might ramp it up a little bit for LA Mall.

Simple things like, like heat training or, or things don’t hurt. It’s obviously not super hot there, but the simulator’s sort of the big one. We use the simulator in Indianapolis, the Del la simulator, [00:12:00] and then they’ve got a twin and it’s leaf for the European drivers. We do a lot of pre and post work. So pre Le Mans, I think we did four days in the US one and four days in the Italian one.

They had a lot of data from the previous two years working through set up ideas and hiring models just to see how close we can get it. And since it was our first time, we had a lot to learn as a team. And then after LA Ma correlating the tire again because we had different compounds and making sure everything makes sense with our OnTrack data.

So when we go back it will be even that much better.

Crew Chief Eric: So I know it’s not a fair comparison, but last year I got to try Dara’s Simulator at PRI, which is not the same as what you’re using, but I noted the software was different. I believe they were using a highly modified version of something like a set of Corsa versus, you know, max versus Stoppen is practicing on iRacing or whatever it is because Le Mans doesn’t exist in every piece of software.

Do you happen to know like what the sim is that the Dara hardware runs on?

Ricky Taylor: Yeah, they use Ractor Pro. [00:13:00] So Ractor does all the track scans and even the base vehicle model comes from that. And then they build off of that. The biggest component is the tire model, and each manufacturer licenses Michelin to build their specific tire model.

And so that costs a good fortune. Uh, I think for, for that. ’cause each manufacturer has a, their own Michelin representative, and they’re a Michelin engineer that. Isn’t sharing any of his tricks with the other Michelin guy in other camps, and he is responsible to build as good of a tire model as possible for your specific car.

So that’s where a lot of the development goes. But the base of it is, is our factor,

Crew Chief Eric: obviously on super high end equipment like de LA’s. The difference between virtual and reality probably isn’t very big anymore compared to the commercial stuff or the things you can buy at home. But is there still a moment when you’re on this?

Sim where you realize I’m playing a game. It’s not quite like this in real life.

Ricky Taylor: I think the closer you get to [00:14:00] reality they almo, the more difficult it gets to make it realistic. So when you talk about things like the track scan is, is probably the easiest thing to get right. There’s a bump here, the curb does this.

The check goes this direction. Those are all sort of the easier things to get right. I’d say as you get more detailed, you know, building a static tire model is easy, but when the car slides, what happens in reality, the tire overheats and then the grip drops and that compounds on itself. So modeling that becomes very difficult and oftentimes when you’re trying to model that, you make it less accurate.

While it’s highly accurate and it’s a great tool, it’s easy to get lost and easy to lose your direction as well. So luckily, there’s a really smart group of guys that do this stuff, and I think it’s also about the teams and drivers understanding where the value is and how to use it properly and not trust certain things too much.

Crew Chief Eric: Since Jordan was here before the 24, there was a lot of hype and a lot of excitement and a lot of hope for [00:15:00] Team Cadillac this year. So now that you’re here, let’s do a little postmortem. Let’s talk about what happened at Le Mans.

Ricky Taylor: Oh boy. Again, it was our first time there as a team that was super exciting. I think everybody had been looking forward to this and brand new car for the mall, and everybody was going into it as a learning experience.

I don’t think anybody in the team had expectations to do anything crazy. Uh, obviously Jota was their first year with the Cadillac as well, but they have a great history at Le Mans, almost winning overall in LMP two one year and having some really strong runs in the Porsche 9 6 3 as well. And then Action Express was the only one returning in the same situation.

And then when Jota got the poll and Jack and the Action Express Car actually did the fastest lapping in qualifying, the expectations became a little different. Obviously we just missed hyper pole. I actually made a mistake exit the Porsche curves that cost the transferred time. Otherwise, I think we wouldn’t have been fighting for pole, but I think we would’ve been in hyper pole at least, which would’ve been a, a pretty neat [00:16:00] thing for the team.

But everybody has excuses. And then moving to the race, it was sort of getting to the point where we were gonna settle in and into that night phase where you were talking about just sort of settling in. We’d lost some track position early, but continuing to click collapse and and work our way through, and then US and Action Express have engine failure.

You know, that was basically it. And Philippe tells the story really well. He’s like, you realize how big Le Mans is? It took him like two hours to get back to the pit lane. On some guy’s scooter from parking, the parking the car in a field. He said he feels like he was a World War II behind enemy line, sort of, uh, or he parked the car.

And so that was the end of the race and I was actually sleeping when, when it happened. Yeah. Jordan woke me up and it was a shame ’cause I think finishing that race. Unlike some other ones, finishing it is is quite an accomplishment. So that was a real shame for the team.

Crew Chief Eric: You and your brother have raced together many times over the years, but this was the first time you’d raced together at Le Mans, obviously under your dad’s banner, Wayne Taylor Racing.

What was it like? [00:17:00] The whole family at Le Mans?

Ricky Taylor: It was really cool. And like you said, my dad as well. When Jordan went to Le Mans for the first time, I went to watch and he was driving for the Corvette factory team. It was a big deal, and they’re in the same Corvette hospitality. Now that we’re going first full circle that we went to in 2001, it didn’t change a bit.

It was the exact same building, the same catering, everything from 2001 until 2012. And then when we went back. This year we were sharing it with, you know, the whole family together. And it was a new hospitality. It was actually the same real estate, but doing it all together with a lot of the same people, especially for my dad.

Uh, a good sort of check on the, the life bucket list that we all could do it together. And for me to see it through Jordan’s eyes. ’cause he’s obviously had much more success in Le Mansr than I have. And to be sharing the car with him and. And get his, his inputs and things as well as Philippe also winning in his class at Le Mans.

So I was the one trying to learn as much as I could.

Crew Chief Eric: So, Ricky, you’ve [00:18:00] mentioned some memorable moments as we’ve been talking here. I wanna pull one thread out of your driver career at Le Mans, and that’s racing for Jackie Chan. In the LMP two program. So what was that like? What was Jackie’s involvement? I mean, we were rooting for it going Jackie Chan, this is awesome, right?

I mean he’s done a lot of car related movie Thunderbolt and you know, Cannonball and stuff like that. But what was it like being part of that team

Ricky Taylor: That was so cool. So that year Jackie Chan was supporting Team Jota at the time for the full, we season with two orcas and then Lee had two entries as well and they ended up partnering with.

Jackie Chan, dc racing at the time, and I was in one of Thes. You know, I’ve been in quite a revolving door of drives over the years, so it was just a contact that I’d had and he asked me to do them on. Uh, of course I said yes. And so it was in a leisure, not one of the orcas, and I never got to meet Jackie Chan.

I was so excited to meet him. Obviously I grew up watching Rush Hour and all of his movies, and I couldn’t wait to meet him. And I guess [00:19:00] I might be wrong on this. But I think David Chang, who was running the team at the time, his family’s involved with the university in China, and Jackie Chan supports a film school there.

And that partnership became a racing partnership. I don’t know the behind the scenes, but I never got to meet him, most importantly for me. Uh, and uh, it was cool. It was cool to, to be involved with that though. And, uh. Program was super successful. Just to be alongside all those people was, was really good.

And I got to drive with Km Lagar and he was a really good teammate, so I, I learned a bit from him and still watching him, him racing, GT GT stuff now.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, it’s a good segue to talk a little bit more about LMP two. I’ve made this comment many times before that LMP two doesn’t seem to get enough love, especially on television.

How do we fix that? Why is that? I mean, you guys are out there, you know, racing as hard as you can. It is a little bit of a spec series in some respects, but there’s good racing going on there. How do we get more people [00:20:00] engaged and excited about LMP two?

Ricky Taylor: Yeah, you gotta have Philippe on here ’cause Brendan’s been our teammate for the long distance races for a few years.

Met Brendan Hartley and obviously he is an overall winner at LA Mall, uh, with Toyota and Felipe is a winner in AY two with United Auto Sports. And they talk about their wins. And Philippe has always given him a hard time about his Toyota wins, that you didn’t have to beat anybody and he beat 22 guys on track, uh, like in the class.

And it’s alter ultra competitive. And I think within the sport everybody watches L MP two, they’re hiring such good drivers. The teams have refined those cars to the nth degree, and the racing is is super close and exciting. A really strong deep field that you really don’t know who’s gonna win. To answer your question, I don’t know how to sell it anymore.

I think if the cameras were on them more, I think you’d see some unbelievable racing. Obviously the hypercar class is what it is now. It’s, it’s incredible. But yeah, I think everybody’s sleeping on Olympia two in general. When you [00:21:00] watch those races and you put yourself in one of those cars, you could really appreciate the the level that’s being raced over there.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, you hit on an important point there because we’re starting to see a lot of growth in what used to be LMP one, GTP, hypercar, whatever you wanna call it. Now, as a result of more and more brands coming online, whether it’s Ford or Hyundai, with the New Genesis and all these other cars that are coming into that class, is that gonna force LMP two to get smaller, do you think?

Ricky Taylor: I think it’s a political question. That’s the way that it looks like it would go naturally. It’s like you have these high paying manufacturers that are spending tens and tens of millions of dollars to race in the top class and, and then you’ve got a customer backed class that the harder sell. I don’t know if that’s the way it’s gonna go.

Sports, car racing, as we all know. Very cyclical. So this golden era is not gonna last. And the days of, you know, needing LMP two to support our racing world is, is gonna come back. So, yeah, I don’t know. That’s a tough question. I wish we could just keep adding garages at La Mo ’cause [00:22:00] I think it would be a shame to eliminate, you know, such a great historic class.

Crew Chief Eric: Speaking of adding garages, garage 56. Take us to 2023. Obviously your brother was directly involved with that. What are your thoughts on the Camaro and the American Pride and all the things we saw alongside of the hundredth being a big to do

Ricky Taylor: that was so cool? As an American going to LA Mall, there’s a bit of a stereotype to it.

Like, oh, an American and LA Ma doesn’t really fit. We’re so far outside of our comfort zone from the outside. To us, it’s just another, it’s another big race, but then that just took it to the max, I think. You take everything that’s American and you put it on track, a loud, you know, V eight nascar, any American driver, an American team, very American team doing NASCAR style pit stops.

It was a proud moment, I think, to see the reception that it got. I was super proud. I loved the pit stop competition in Le Mansr. I’ve never watched it as intently. It was that year. And to see the, the NASCAR crew go and beat right at the top, I think they turned a lot of heads. ’cause the teams [00:23:00] really put a lot into that.

So yeah, it was a proud moment and it’s cool to see the notoriety that it’s getting. Even still Jordan’s getting requests to do things here and there for us, so it’s nice to see.

Crew Chief Eric: Was there ever a moment when you were out there, whether it was qualifying or practice, when you looked in the rear view mirror and you went.

That’s a GT car coming up really fast and your eyes get big and go, wait, no, that’s Jensen. In a Camaro, their closing speed was insane,

Ricky Taylor: especially year after year. When the, when the rules are quite consistent, year on year, you really get into a rhythm of, okay, if I catch a GT here, I’m gonna pass ’em by here, or I see him up, he is, you know, going into Porsche Curves and I’m coming out of Arage.

You pretty much get an idea of where you’re gonna catch him and pass ’em, and you get that rhythm. And with the garage 56 car, you had to throw all that out the window because you could catch ’em into the Ford ccan and you wouldn’t pass ’em by turn one. ’cause that drag from the exit of Ford to D one was way faster than anything else out there.

And like you said, the light, like you’d see the lights and you’re like, why am I not [00:24:00] pulling away from this guy?

Crew Chief Eric: You mentioned Philippe Albuquerque, one of your longtime teammates in many series. You guys have raced together. Having him with you at Le Mans, how does that change the dynamic of your team of teamwork?

You know, competing at that international level. Kind of give us an insight of what it’s like in the pits and the orchestration that it takes to, you know, complete a 24 hour race.

Ricky Taylor: Specifically about Philippe. The last time he was at Le Mans in the top class was in the Audi LMP one, and. That is one of the proudest times of his career.

I think he, he reached the pinnacle for any driver getting to be involved in that program and his teammates with Tom Christensen and, and all the, the legends Frank Belo was, was around and Dido Capella was around like all of the guys that were all fans of, he was in that program. So really cool. And he is got so many stories.

So now when we went to a hybrid platform. He had a lot more knowledge than the rest of us. He had a big head start from being in, in that [00:25:00] world. So when it came to energy management or how to strategize, deploying and regen and how we do all that stuff, he had a really good perspective of it. ’cause he, he’d raced it before his year at Le Mans.

He didn’t actually race his car and crashed before he got in the car. So to him, he felt like he had some unfinished business and he wanted to get back and be in the top class. And so to share that with him was really special for me. We have a great relationship and we’ve been together for quite a few years now.

Just to go there with him. He was loving every second of it, walking through the hospitality. He is like, everything feels right. Everything in the world feels, feels right that he we’re here together and racing in the top class. So

Crew Chief Eric: it’s funny you mentioned that because as racers. We have a tendency to learn from each other.

It’s a very collaborative environment. Hey, this is how I take this corner. This is maybe where you can save a couple tenths and scrape us some feet. If you’re coming to the table going, I know everything. Well, there’s faster guys. Right. So that being said, Philippe, all this experience, what do you think is the most important thing that he shared with you or that you learned [00:26:00] from him and his driving style?

Ricky Taylor: So Felipe and I are, are very different people. He’s super confident, so we balance each other out. He is the first one to, to give his opinion. I’m very easily swayed, so I always feel like if somebody makes a good argument, I’m like, maybe they’re right. And I’m very open-minded. I never feel like I know more than anyone else where he’s taught me to trust myself, you know, push my opinion and believe in what I’m, what I’m selling driving wise.

He’s really detailed. We started off driving together. We did not like the same car at all, which in some senses is good in sports car racing because the track changes so much that at some point in the race one driver’s gonna like it and the other’s gonna hate it and vice versa. So sometimes that’s good.

And he sort of brought me closer to his direction, just a much more unstable car. I think that’s made me a better driver to be able to adapt more things. He came through a time when he was racing Reno, two liters and you know, you had very li limited setup [00:27:00] options and he had to really develop his driving style to drive around problems.

So those, those lessons. He passed on to me and that’s a way that we sort of brought each other along.

Crew Chief Eric: You mentioned something there without realizing, you mentioned it and I hear it’s a general complaint from a lot of the, let’s say, seasoned enthusiasts. That’s the term I want to use in that the cars are too reliable nowadays.

We’re hoping for something to break, to mix up the racing. Wouldn’t it be cool if they brought back manual transmissions, you know, if you missed a shift and over Revit, you know, like it was in the, in the golden era of endurance racing. Do you feel that way? Do you think the cars are too reliable in some ways?

Ricky Taylor: Yeah, I think the idea of it is cool, but I love the fact that you always have a chance that the racing is close. Maybe because I’m a driver, if I do a good job and my teammates do a good job and the team executes well, we should have a good result. Where if I’m a mechanic. Maybe I want the cars to be less reliable, so that might work and stand above the others because I believe in myself.

So from a driver’s perspective, I think I like where it is In terms of reliability, [00:28:00] the best drivers will still separate themselves in terms of we don’t have H pattern gear boxes, we have carbon brakes, we don’t have steel brakes. So we don’t have to say brakes, but on the flip side, because we don’t have those, those things that aren’t around anymore, we have a lot of systems changes that we can make.

We can change contraction control. We can change a lot of hybrid settings that change the handling of the car. We’ve got anti-roll bars that we can move active brake bias, brake bias, migration. All kinds of things that the driver can change in the car. Bandwidth that you have in your head can still separate yourself.

So I’d say if it becomes easy, then I would push it to where like you wanna make it difficult. So we’ve got different compounds of tires, none of them last perfectly forever at a stable rate. So there’s plenty of difficulty, I think, in the sport, and that’s a good thing, regardless of technology.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, Ricky, the audience chat is open and I got a couple.

Audience questions for you here, but we’re gonna start with this one. Even though you’re a driver, secretly, you’re probably rooting [00:29:00] for some team to win, not just your own. Let’s say maybe in the LMP one class or something like that. Has there been a particular mark that you’ve been rooting for in the background?

Ricky Taylor: And I’m sorry, in, uh, in whack.

Crew Chief Eric: You tell me.

Ricky Taylor: Okay. If I can’t pick Cadillac. After the year Toyota’s had, Brendan being in the Toyota, I feel so bad for them over there. I know they, they work hard and they’re such a strong team. They execute really well. I think they really deserve some good results. So I have to say, I, I’m cheering for Brendan mostly.

Uh, but that program, I feel like, you know, they’ve had a lot of success, but it’d be nice to see them get back on top.

Crew Chief Eric: So for you, is there a favorite race car? Of all time. Something you would love to get behind the wheel of. Maybe it’s something like Le Mans Classic or even one of the more current cars where it’s like, Hey, I’d love to get behind the wheel of the 4 9 9 p or something like that.

Ricky Taylor: I think a big one is the 9 6 2, but I don’t want to drive it. But for me, the one I would love to drive, uh, would be the Friday, 3 33. That’s sort of one of the first memories I have of my dad [00:30:00] racing properly and the sound of it. I just love that car. I had so much success back in the day, and I’d love to experience that.

Crew Chief Eric: Sam Victor writes, what’s the mindset preparing as a driver? Switching between cars, for example, switching from driving a GT car to a prototype or even a streetcar on the track.

Ricky Taylor: Oh yeah, a streetcar on the track feels like a completely different thing. It’s an interesting point ’cause Jack eight and Philippe and I were having the same discussion ’cause Jack is doing DTM and IMSA in Cadillac and Philippe is doing L MP two and El LMS and IMSA and Cadillac.

And I’m just doing Cadillac basically. And so we were kind of talking about. Who has it most difficult? Is it Ricky? Who has the least seat time? Is it Philippe who has to transition from an LP two very lightweight, right down force prototype to a heavy prototype? Or is it Jack who’s got the biggest split of all of them?

It was interesting. There’s points to be made for, for all of ’em. I think more seat time is always better. Driving a variety gives you a, a good toolbox of [00:31:00] driving styles of how to adapt and how to change quickly. To answer the question. I think when you switch your mindset over, it’s always what makes this car fat or what makes this car perform well on the stopwatch?

Is it? If it’s a GT car, you know that you’re not gonna drive sort of a V style corner, you’re not gonna be prioritizing late breaking. The speed trace always looks like a climate is always climbing, whereas, you know, high down force cars, they plateau. So you prioritize entry speed and you don’t worry so much about the exit speed.

And you’ll start there. And then you’ll sort of work backwards of how do I treat the corner differently depending on, you know, what the car needs. And so case by case, I think there’s a lot of experimentation and stuff involved too.

Crew Chief Eric: Alright, John Rist writes regarding tire wear at Le Mans. What do you mean?

That Le Mans is a low energy track? Did I hear you correctly?

Ricky Taylor: Yeah, so I would think the same thing. When you say energy, it’s just how much load and energy is going into the tire. So it comes everything from top speed, from high [00:32:00] speed corners, from the gradient of the track, from the the macro or the micro of the track.

You know how the stones are laid out, breaking zones. All those things sort of add up into, you know, what makes like high energy or not. So for example, Detroit on paper, the New Street course looks high energy ’cause it’s lots of corners, it’s lots of braking. The cars are sliding around a lot in reality, concrete.

You know, the stones are very tiny. They’re close together, like it’s very smooth. It’s actually very low energy. We use the soft tire for the entire race there. Kona, on the other hand. Pretty high energy only because of the banking. ’cause you have so much vertical load through the banking, whereas you think you’re going straight and the car’s not really sliding.

And Le Mans is such long straits with sort of a low energy surface that the way that it works out between all those variables, it just happens to be quite, quite low energy. Not to mention the conditions are quite cool and mild, especially at night.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, Scott was on the same wavelength I was and he wants to know [00:33:00] about sibling rivalries in the sport, but I’ve heard you and Jordan go back and forth and roast each other and you know, on NBC with Calvin Fish and talking about the good old days and things like that.

But I think we need to take this a step further. So I’m gonna ask you, who’s the better driver? Your brother or Rodney’s sand store?

Ricky Taylor: Rodney is a legend. I, I haven’t seen anything he can’t do, so it’d be hard to, hard to bid against that guy. Oh, I did not see that coming.

Crew Chief Eric: Ricky, you’ve been talking a lot and you are running for Cadillac.

Let’s talk about the future now as we sort of wrap up this episode of Evening with a Legend. But first I wanna get sort of a crowd question, being involved with Cadillac, what are your thoughts on Cadillac and Formula One in 2026?

Ricky Taylor: Oh, it’s exciting. It’s really cool. I think we were worried initially all of our engineers are gonna leave because they need so many people to start that program.

They’re looking for almost a thousand people, I think. Where do you find them? We’re having a hard enough time finding people for our little program, and it’s so cool to see Cadillac. You know? You think this [00:34:00] program feels big. That is just a whole nother level. So to see it actually happening, to see it.

The simulator fully up and running. They’re doing simulation races. All the people are in place. It’s cool to see the drivers that are involved. I must say I’m really excited for Colton. He’s sort of on the, on the track. Track, sorry, no pun intended. He’s got a hard season, I think, ahead of him. F two, but he has a lot of respect for it and I think all of it is cool.

I’m really excited to see the car on track and I know everybody has very reserved expectations ’cause everybody else has a super high starting point. But, uh, it’s cool to see the same brand that we’re affiliated with competing in the medical club, motor sports.

Crew Chief Eric: So speaking of, what does the outlook look like for the 20 26, 24 hours of Le Mans With Cadillac, the plan is to return, right?

Ricky Taylor: The plan is, yeah. So obviously Jota will go, uh, they’ve got the two entries. I don’t know. The entries situation is always tricky. I hope we get an entry. I think, you know, we learned a lot last year, so hopefully, [00:35:00] hopefully Cadillac has at least three. Like you were saying, with the car count, it’s probably gonna be getting more and more difficult as the.

The full season wet entries increase specifically for Le Mans. I would say this past year was a pretty good one. Pretty good opportunity, obviously come the race, the Porsches and the Ferraris were very, very strong, where over a single, I think Cadillacs had a pretty good single lap pace, but none of us had anywhere close to the, the race pace as ’em.

So. A lot of our arrow updates were geared towards improving that. So we, we had, we just unveiled the joker tested on track a couple times, been in the sim, looks like it’s in the right direction. Obviously we have a lot to learn about. It’s a, it’s a pretty different update. I wouldn’t say in one direction or the other, but it’s different.

So Le Mans is a pretty unique track and it’s hard to create, I think, when all the manufacturers build a car. You decide either we’re gonna build a car for America, or we’re gonna build a car for LA Mall. It’s hard to build one that does both well. So if we have a terrible Long Beach, [00:36:00] at least we can be like, well, maybe we’ll have a good LA mall.

So that’s the way it will probably, we’ll probably go,

Crew Chief Eric: is your seat guaranteed or do you have a fallback in LMP two if it doesn’t work out?

Ricky Taylor: Nobody see is guaranteed when there’s no entry yet. Um, so I’d say if there’s a WTR entry, we have four drivers, only three can go. So I think it would only be fair if we rotated through, and this is probably not for me to say, but I think Louis should be in the car.

And one of the three of us should look for something else. But in the same breath, I think Louis also has the best chance of finding an MP two ride. ’cause he’s winning everything. And I think, you know, AO might have an entry for MP two. So yeah. I don’t know.

Crew Chief Eric: From a driver’s perspective, what makes Le Mans the most special event?

You know, people talk about how it’s one of the brown jewels of motorsport. Do you see it that way as well?

Ricky Taylor: Yeah, I do. Sometimes it’s hard to remove myself. From being a sports car racing family, we just grew up in sports, car racing. Obviously we watch the Indy [00:37:00] 500 every year. We watch the Daytona 500 every year.

We, you know, we watch all the F1 races, all the IndyCar races, and we live in sports car racing. And so we grew up like you intensely up all night watching the MA as kids, and it was just always the biggest one. So outside of that, as a driver, I think the one thing you notice is how much it means to so many people, whether it’s the parade or.

Something as simple as Scrutineering. Lamont does an amazing job of making a big deal out of everything. And like we have tech and I’m so, and it’s a tent where the car rolls through, a couple of engineers look at the car and, and then you go on your way and you fix a couple things. For Lamont, it’s a whole public event with autographs and photos and a staged picture, and the car goes up in the middle of town.

Everything from start to finish is. World class and, and then on top of that, I think because it attracts the world’s best, it is inherently the hardest one. You wanna win against the best and you wanna, you know, win the, the [00:38:00] most difficult races that one happens to be them all.

Crew Chief Eric: So after nine attempts and many more to come at Le Mans, what has it taught you?

Ricky Taylor: Yeah, there’s a lot of ways to lose races, I think. But I think, I think it’s just the attention to detail, the, you have to keep the intensity up for so long. And so racing, like I said earlier, you’re always in the mix. Intensity is always high because you’re always racing somebody and there’s always a restart and you know, you’re battling for track position, you know, lap after lap.

But at the same time, things aren’t super consequential until the last couple hours, whereas. Le Mans, you. You just have to be, I keep saying this, but you just have to be so detailed. And just to mention my mistakes. One year at Le Mans, I passed before a safety car line, so I did the restart out of our know, and I passed a car before the safety car line and penalty, and we never came back from it.

Another year it was a bit of a slow getaway outta the pits and we lost a position and then you gotta fight for hours to get it back, and little things like that. [00:39:00] So don’t really matter. And Le Mans, it sort of stresses everything. So yeah, I think it’s just that intensity level and attention to detail lap after that for the whole weekend.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, looking ahead, it sounds like you’ve set some goals for yourself and obviously you have some unfinished business at Le Mans. So when it comes to racing in general, what’s next for Ricky? Something we should look forward to in 2026?

Ricky Taylor: Hopefully it’s a better than 20, 25, I think certainly for me, but as a team, this was one of the hardest years we’ve ever had without a win.

Really struggling for pace. Again, it was our first season with the car, so we give ourselves a little grace with that, but at the same time, we wanna do better, and I’ll be the first to admit that. I don’t think I maximized myself in some situations, so we’re not pointing fingers, but we’re trying to build on last year.

So it’s one thing when you go from year to year to have somebody else’s notes of a history of at a racetrack, but now we get to go with our own firsthand notes and, you know, pick up at a much higher level than last year. So hopefully [00:40:00] you’re gonna see a much, much stronger born normal WCR.

Crew Chief Eric: Well with that, Ricky, as we close out, I want to pass the microphone to David Lowe, our a CO representative for some final thoughts.

David Lowe: Ricky, on behalf of the A CO and Endurance Racing fans everywhere, thank you for wonderful evening. I really wish you the best. Looking forward to seeing you at laal this year.

Ricky Taylor: Thank you very much. Hope to see you there.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, folks that wraps up this evening with a legend where we explored Ricky Taylor’s journey through the world of the greatest endurance race, the 24 hours of Le Mans.

From his early impressions of the legendary circuit to the challenges of racing through the night. Ricky’s experiences reflect the dedication and passion that define true endurance racers. His perspective reminds us that success at Le Mans isn’t just about speed, it’s about teamwork, adaptability, and resilience under pressure.

So to keep up with Ricky and his racing career, be sure to follow him on Instagram and x formerly Twitter at Ricky Taylor race. And visit Wayne Taylor racing.com for [00:41:00] news team updates and upcoming events. And with that, we hope you enjoyed this presentation and look forward to more evening with a legend.

And on behalf of everyone here and those listening at home, thank you Ricky for sharing your evening with us.

Ricky Taylor: Thanks. Thanks so much for having me. It was good fun.

Crew Chief Eric: This episode has been brought to you by the Automobile Club of the West and the A-C-O-U-S-A from the awe-inspiring speed demons that have graced the track to the courageous drivers who have pushed the limits of endurance. The 24 hours of the Le Mans is an automotive spectacle like no other. For over a century the 24 hours Le Mans has urged manufacturers to innovate for the benefit of future motorists, and it’s a celebration of the relentless pursuit of speed and excellence in the world of motorsports.

To learn more about or to become a member of the ACO ussa look no further than www.Le Mansn.org, click on [00:42:00] English in the upper right corner and then click on the a CO members tab for club offers. Once you’ve become a member, you can follow all the action on the Facebook group, A-C-O-U-S-A Members Club, and become part of the Legend with Future Evening with the legend meetups.

This episode has been brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports as part of our Motoring Podcast network. For more episodes like this, tune in each week for more exciting and educational content from organizations like The Exotic Car Marketplace, the Motoring Historian, break Fix, and many others. If you’d like to support Grand Touring Motorsport and the Motoring Podcast Network, sign up for one of our many sponsorship tiers at www.patreon.com/gt Motorsports.

Please note that the content, opinions and materials presented and expressed in this episode are those of its creator, and this episode has been published with their consent. If you have any [00:43:00] inquiries about this program, please contact the creators of this episode via email or social media as mentioned in the episode.

Highlights

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

00:00 Ricky’s early Le Mans Memories
03:09 First Racing Laps 2013
04:55 IMSA vs WEC Culture
06:25 Night Stints, Track Surprises and Passing
10:50 Training and Simulator Prep
14:53 2025 Cadillac Le Mans Postmortem
16:50 Family Racing Together
17:59 Jackie Chan LMP2 Story & Why LMP2 Matters
22:04 Garage 56
24:01 Filipe Albuquerque’s Hybrid Knowhow
27:09 Are the Cars Too Reliable?
28:48 Audience Q&A
33:29 Thoughts on Cadillac F1 in 2026
34:40 Le Mans 2026 Plans
38:03 Why Le Mans Matters Most and Final Thanks!

Bonus Content

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When Ricky finally made his Le Mans debut in 2013 with Corvette Racing, the experience was overwhelming in ways he didn’t expect.

Le Mans is technically a street circuit, and the opening laps are dusty, slippery, and unpredictable. But the biggest shock came from the LMP1 hybrids of the era: “I’d be in first or second gear coming out of Mulsanne Corner, and they were already doing 180 mph when the hybrid kicked in.” That speed differential forced a new level of awareness — and humility.

Photo by Jamey Price; courtesy Wayne Taylor Racing

Taylor has spent most of his career in IMSA, and he’s quick to point out how different the culture is compared to Europe.

IMSA paddocks are open, communal, and social.
WEC paddocks are structured, closed, and businesslike.

Those differences extend to the racing itself. IMSA’s full-course yellows compress the field and encourage aggression. WEC’s long green-flag runs reward precision and consistency. “A mistake in hour one at Le Mans… you may never get it back.”

Modern Le Mans prep is as much digital as physical. Taylor and his teammates spent eight days in the Dallara simulator between the U.S. and Italy, working through setup ideas and tire models. The tire modeling alone is a massive undertaking — each manufacturer has its own Michelin engineer building a bespoke simulation. But even with all that tech, Taylor says the hardest part is mental: “That constant qualifying‑lap mentality really wears you down.”

The Loneliness of the Night

Fans often imagine Le Mans as a constant wheel‑to‑wheel battle. But Taylor says the reality — especially at night — is far more solitary. “Ford vs. Ferrari actually captured that sense of loneliness really well.” As the field spreads out, drivers settle into long, quiet stretches of qualifying‑style laps, managing tires, fuel, and fatigue. The rhythm becomes almost meditative — until traffic snaps you back to reality.

Television distorts the scale of Le Mans. Corners like Arnage and Mulsanne are shockingly tight, and the public‑road crown makes three‑wide racing nearly impossible. “You’re yelling at the TV — ‘Just pass him!’ But it’s a two‑lane country road.” That crown also affects setup and plank wear, adding another layer of complexity.

Taylor didn’t sugarcoat Cadillac’s 2024 Le Mans effort. Despite promising qualifying pace, both the WTR and Action Express cars suffered engine failures. “Finishing Le Mans is an accomplishment. It was a real shame.” Still, the team learned a tremendous amount — and the new aero “joker” update offers hope for 2026.

This year marked the first time Ricky, Jordan, and Wayne Taylor all competed at Le Mans together under the Wayne Taylor Racing banner. “A good check on the life bucket list,” Ricky said. Sharing the experience — and the hospitality building they first visited in 2001 — made the moment even more meaningful.

Jackie Chan, LMP2 (the Underrated Class) & Garage 56

One of Taylor’s most memorable Le Mans drives came with Jackie Chan DC Racing, though he never actually met Jackie Chan himself.

He also passionately defended LMP2: “Everybody’s sleeping on LMP2. The racing is unbelievable.” With hypercar grids expanding, the future of LMP2 is uncertain — but Taylor believes the class is too important to lose.

Taylor lit up when discussing the 2023 Garage 56 NASCAR Camaro project. “It was a proud moment. They turned a lot of heads.” The closing speeds were so unusual that drivers had to relearn their traffic instincts — the Camaro could out‑drag prototypes in certain sections.

Taylor credits longtime teammate Philippe Albuquerque with shaping his driving and confidence. “He taught me to trust myself… and to push my opinion.” Their contrasting personalities — Philippe’s boldness and Ricky’s analytical nature — have made them a formidable pairing.

Why Le Mans Still Matters: Looking ahead to 2026

For Taylor, Le Mans is the crown jewel not just because of its history, but because of its intensity. “You have to be so detailed… so perfect… for so long.” Every mistake is magnified. Every second counts. And every year teaches something new.

Taylor is candid about the challenges of 2025 — no wins, inconsistent pace, and a steep learning curve with the new car. But he’s optimistic: “Now we get to go with our own firsthand notes… hopefully you’ll see a much stronger WTR.” Cadillac plans to return to Le Mans in 2026, though entries are increasingly competitive. Taylor’s seat isn’t guaranteed — but his determination is.

After nine attempts, Ricky Taylor remains as hungry as ever for a Le Mans victory. His journey — shaped by family, forged in competition, and fueled by resilience — reflects everything that makes endurance racing special.

And as he looks toward 2026, one thing is clear: he’s not done with Le Mans, and Le Mans isn’t done with him.

FCA Concours in Pasadena

Behind the Garage Door

Wallace Wyss

May 7, 2026

Before this Ferrari Club of America (FCA) Southwest event was called “Ferraris on Colorado” or some such, but since it was in Pasadena some thought it must be in Colorado so they changed the name. It’s still on Colorado Street, venue of the famed Rose Parade. It was a great event despite rain for the second year in a row.

And Ferrari ‘s US distributor stepped up again and had a display of current cars, and, a blessing to me, free coffee, mocha, lattes, etc. which would have cost you $5 or more at the nearest Starbucks. I think this offering of free refreshments “democratizes” Ferrari a little more, I mean before you would be a bit trepidatious to walk their red carpet full of $400,000-$1 million -plus cars, but now all are welcome. Even if they are a little short in their Ferrari finance bank account.

Most outstanding was a SR1 roadster, the single-seater (the two-seater with windscreen is the SR2), and to say it was awesome is an understatement. Now I only saw it drive from its transport to the red carpet so I can’t say what the driver uses for protection out on the road in a windshield-less car. But to see it on the road among the crowd was like seeing someone riding a white charging horse. With all the myriad of US regulations it is unbelievable that a modern automaker can make such a car that captures the spirit of the Fifties.

As far as old cars owned by FCA members an outstanding one of a 330GTC with a special Dino like wraparound rear roof style, Turns out the first was built for Princess de Rethy and three more followed from Pininfarina with a design that looks lightweight but stylish. One brave 250GT owner parked his car, top down, in the rain but finally put the top up to show, yes, indeed classic Ferraris do come equipped for the weather.

There was one old GTE, and an outfit that maintains Ferrari collections for customers displayed a squeaky clean black short wheelbase Berlinetta. I was unaware there were such firms in SoCal but now understand their need. If you have several cars, you need someone to “get one ready” for an appearance, especially if you are out of town a lot.

There was one Dino 246GT but Dinos were rare at the event as were Daytonas. A 275GTB was present, without a rear bumper, though it was not a Competitzione, which has a lower profile body and more air vents.

There was a presentation for several owners whose cars were judged winners rain and all. This writer was thrilled to see his old amigo, 95-year old Manhattan Beach resident Cpt. Earl Waggoner honored. He has been in Ferrari club activities in Los Angeles for well over half a century and, though now forbidden from driving due to eye problems, always finds someone to help him get one of his two Lussos to an event.

This venue is a good one, for spectators because it’s free-free-free. Even the parking is free on adjacent city streets. There are plenty of coffee shops available in a short walk (though $5 for a cuppa java is a bit Beverly Hills-ish).

I didn’t count them but I would say there were 100 Ferraris parked side by side. Enough to bring a crowd of sightseers with dogs, baby carriages, and all (and fortunately no kids on skateboards!).

Photo courtesy Wallace Wyss; Details on how you can acquire this painting are available at the bottom of this post.
Photo courtesy Wallace Wyss; Details on how you can acquire this painting are available at the bottom of this post.

From my booth selling fine art, I especially enjoyed talking design with students from the nearby campuses of Art Center College of Design, a school which has trained a notable Ferrari designer (such as Ken Okuyama who graduated in 1986 and later returned to teach there before starting his own car company). I told the students I hope they graduate while there are still internal combustion cars.

Let’s hope next year’s event will be rain free…

EDITOR’S NOTE: Wallace Wyss welcomes news of galleries who would consider consigning Ferrari art. He can be reached at photojournalistpro2@gmail.com

Init Esports Named Official Sim Racing Partner of the CECC for 2026–2027

INIT eSports

May 6, 2026

Partnership unveiled at 2026 May Madness and will have male and female categories to compete in online races and qualifiers nationwide with the championships held in May 2027

WACO, Texas — May 6, 2026 — Init Esports today officially announced a partnership with Collegiate Sports Management Group (CSMG) to bring sim racing to the Collegiate Esports Commissioners Cup (CECC), the nation’s largest collegiate esports championship event. The partnership was was unveiled live on May 2 during the CECC May Madness, which is produced by CSMG, in Waco, Texas, marking a defining moment for the future of collegiate motorsports gaming.

Beginning in the 2026–2027 academic year, Init Esports and the CECC will roll out a structured collegiate sim racing program designed to give student-athletes a competitive, high-performance platform to race, develop, and earn recognition. The program will feature both male and female categories, reinforcing a shared commitment to expanding access and visibility for women in motorsports.

Additional details regarding online races, qualifiers, and the full season format will be released in the coming weeks. Colleges interested in participating are encouraged to begin assembling their sim racing teams now, so they are ready to enter the qualifying process as soon as registration opens.

“Sim racing belongs in the collegiate esports landscape. Partnering with Init Esports gives the CECC a world-class operator who understands competition, athlete development, and the culture of motorsports. This is a milestone for our member institutions and for every student who has been waiting for a real path to compete in sim racing at the college level.” — Angela Bernhard Thomas, Chief Esports Officer, CECC / CSMG and EsportsU

“Bringing sim racing to U.S. colleges has been a mission of ours from day one. The CECC is the right home for this program because they share our standards: real competition, real opportunity, and real pathways for both men and women. Starting in the 2026–2027 school year, every college in America can build a sim racing team and have somewhere meaningful to race. This is just the beginning.” — Stefy Bau, Founder & CEO, Init Esports

The collegiate sim racing program will operate under the CECC competitive framework with Init Esports leading race operations, athlete experience, and the technical platform. Schedules, eligibility guidelines, and registration information will be communicated through CECC and Init Esports channels in the weeks ahead.

About the CECC

Collegiate Sports Management Group (CSMG) is an integrated sports, entertainment, and media company committed to advancing traditional sports and esports. The company has expertise in Media Rights, Analytics, Licensing, Sponsorship Sales, Brand Building, Original Content, and Event Production. We empower sports properties, brands, and video game publishers to succeed at the crossroads of tech, sports, entertainment, and video games. Through innovation, efficiency and execution, CSMG has created transformative opportunities, driving growth in traditional sports while unifying and elevating the scholastic esports ecosystem. To learn more, visit us at https://collegiatesmg.com/.

About Init Esports

Init Esports focuses on sim racing events and digital tournaments. They bring eSports content to fans and sponsorship opportunities to brands, while maximizing audience reach across multiple sports, industries, and platforms. Init Esports is a woman-led company where Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility is in their DNA, and their platform aims to combat bullying and cheating to help make the eSports world as safe and fair as possible. To learn more, be sure to logon to www.initesports.gg today or follow them on social media @initesports, join their discord, check out their YouTube Channel, or follow their live content via Twitch.

At Init Esports, founder and CEO Stefy Bau doesn’t just settle for the ordinary. She creates extraordinary experiences by producing thrilling online competitions and real-life events that transcend the boundaries of the eSports universe. And she’s here with us on Break/Fix to share her story, and help you understand why you need to get more involved in the world of eSports.

A Guided Tour of IMSA: Mark Raffauf’s Living History of American Sports Car Racing

History of Motorsports

IMRRC

May 5, 2026

A Guided Tour of IMSA: Mark Raffauf’s Living History of American Sports Car Racing

When The Logbook (our “History of Motorsports” series) turned its attention to IMSA, it did more than revisit a racing organization — it tapped into the memory of someone who lived its evolution from the inside. As the transcript opens, we’re reminded that few figures have shaped, documented, and safeguarded IMSA’s legacy quite like Mark Raffauf, a man who has spent over five decades inside the heartbeat of American sports car racing.

Photo courtesy Mark Raffauf, IMSA Archives

Raffauf’s keynote — delivered as the Jean S. Argetsinger Address — is part personal memoir, part technical chronicle, and part love letter to the people who built IMSA from a bold idea into a global motorsports force. His stories span eras, rule books, rivalries, and revolutions. What follows is a curated journey through that history, retold as a cohesive narrative for readers who want to understand how IMSA became what it is today.

IMSA’s origin story begins not with a boardroom meeting, but with a conversation outside the Turn 4 tunnel at Daytona. As Raffauf recounts, it all started with a call from NASCAR’s Bill France to John Bishop — the man who would become IMSA’s founding architect. France’s pitch was simple: “We need to do a road racing program with a NASCAR business mindset behind it.”

That partnership, along with support from Cameron and Jean Argetsinger and the SCCA lineage Bishop brought with him, set the stage for a new era of American road racing.

Bio

Mark Raffauf’s career in motorsports embodies the ideal combination of a successful motorsports professional who has embraced the writing of history. Mark is both a fine historian and has been a key player in the success of the IMSA series from its inception to the current day. His early career coincided with the extraordinary accomplishments of John Bishop, founder of IMSA, former President of SCCA and one of the key founders of the IMRRC in Watkins Glen. Mark’s keynote address, laced with engaging anecdotal tales and an accurate, factual description of the series, covers his own colorful career in motorsports and the emergence and remarkable success story of IMSA racing over the course of more than forty years.

Mark Raffauf, currently IMSA's Senior Director of Competition, has held IMSA positions through many iterations of IMSA and Grand-Am, including being the second president, in overall management, technical and car regulation development, as well as event, circuit, starting, and racing operations. He is the author, with Mitch Bishop, of IMSA 1969-1989: The Inside Story of How John Bishop Built the World's Greatest Sports Car Racing Series and IMSA 1990-1999: The Turbulent Years of American Sports Car Racing.

Synopsis

In this episode of The Logbook, our History of Motorsports Series, Mark Raffauf traces IMSA’s nearly 60-year evolution from John Bishop and Bill France’s founding phone call to today’s hybrid era. Raffauf recounts IMSA’s early experiments with Formula Fords/Vees, the shift to closed-wheel GT racing, the creation of Camel GT, RS/“little car” series on street tires, and All American GT, plus innovations like road-racing stock cars, Group 5, and GTP prototypes developed with the ACO to keep cars available to private teams. He highlights major manufacturers and iconic cars (Porsche 935/962, BMW CSL, Greenwood Corvette, Mazda rotary, Audi 90 GTO, Jaguar, Nissan, Toyota, Ferrari 333 SP), the growth of street races and Firestone Firehawk, rising speeds and safety limits, ownership turmoil, the IMSA split into ALMS and Grand-Am, and the eventual merger leading to today’s booming IMSA with strong OEM support and advanced hybrid prototypes.

Follow along using the Slide Deck from this Presentation

Transcript

[00:00:00] Break Fix’s History of Motorsports Series is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce and the Arge Singer family.

On this episode of the Logbook, we opened with a figure whose career doesn’t just intersect with American sports car racing history. He’s documented it. Mark Raffauf has spent more than five decades inside the heartbeat of the International Motor Sports Association, better known to us as imsa. Shaping its rule book, guiding its evolution and preserving its stories with the clarity of someone who lived every chapter from the inside, from his earliest days.

Working alongside John Bishop, IMSA’s, founder and former SECA President and a driving force behind the I-M-R-R-C at Watkins Glen Mark witnessed the organization’s rise from a bold idea to one of the most influential forces in global motor sport. His path through technical leadership, car regulation, development, and event [00:01:00] operations, places him among the few who truly understand how the sport grew, fractured, reinvented itself and ultimately thrived.

In his Gene S Ainger keynote address, mark weaves together vivid anecdotes and precise historical detail tracing both his own colorful career and the remarkable 60 year arc of IMSA racing. It’s a story of innovation, resilience, and personalities told by someone who helped write the rule book and later wrote the history itself.

Mark is now IMSA’s senior director of competition and co-author with Mitch Bishop of two definitive volumes on the series. IMSA 1969 to 1989, the inside story of how John Bishop built the world’s greatest sports car racing series and imsa, 1990 to 99, the turbulent years of American sports car racing.

Together, they formed the written counterpart to the perspective he brings on the stage tonight. So without further ado, here is Mark Raffauf giving us a guided tour through 60 years of IMSA’s influence, evolution, and enduring legacy. [00:02:00] So please welcome Mark Raffauf. Thank you.

So I’m gonna try and give you 56 years of history in about 45 minutes. It’s all visual. You don’t have to read anything other than that logo. Which I was inspired last night at the theater watching the film about Cameron and Gene Ainger starting the racing here, and wanted to say that John and Peg Bishop, who are given the credit for founding IMSA with help from people like Cameron and Gene Bill France at nascar.

They’re from Cortland, jc, and Duke’s father was the one that convinced John Bishop to become the executive director of the SCCA in the sixties, which under his oversight created the Canam. TransAm and Formula 5,000. The schism that was brought up earlier or in that film about pro racing drivers versus amateur racing drivers, and the attitude of the SCCA at that time is what had John resign.

And shortly after that, he got a call from Bill France in Daytona. [00:03:00] Bill, John Cameron all knew each other from Sebring, 24 hours of Daytona, SCCA, sort of sanctioning other major events. And I wanted to start with that because kind of it all started right here along with a lot of other things. And what I’m gonna try and talk about is the people, not just the individuals, but they had groups of people they surrounded themselves with really smart people, really enthusiastic, and a passionate people for five decades through various ownerships and so on.

So I start with this. This is actually resides in the I-M-R-R-C. It is John Bishop’s original artwork of the logo of IMSA from day one. It has a little water spot on the eye up there, so he was a little sloppy with his watercolors. Anyway, it all started with a phone call between these two guys, both France on the right, John Bishop on the left.

They’re sitting outside the turn four tunnel at Daytona. Bill called him up and said, we need to do a road racing program with a NASCAR business mindset behind it. Away they went. So what was first Pocono International Raceway? This is actually the cover [00:04:00] of the program of the very first IMSA race at Pocono, which is on the little, I think it’s an eighth mile oval on the Tri Oval area.

And, uh, I don’t know that John designed it, but I bet he had something to do with it. So we started with Formula Fords. Initially there were small ovals that worked out pretty good. So Bill Fran said, well, let’s go to Talladega in Daytona with 50 formula Fords. That didn’t necessarily work as well because they ran around in big packs and had huge accidents.

So we said, okay, we’re not doing that anymore. The same time they started a Formula V program. So IMSA’s legacy and throughout its careers of five decades always had open wheel elements. John and the little staff at the time tried that. It was great racing until they crashed into each other, which all you needed was one guy to sneeze in the middle of the pack, and you had a 20 car pile up.

So we decided that wasn’t a good idea. You could see how it sort of generates into pack racing with these guys. Great stuff, but kind of scary. So what was the next idea? We need closed wheel cars. John decided he would take his background in TransAm. We’ll take those Camaros Mustangs [00:05:00] Javelins. We’ll mix it up with F-I-A-G-T cars.

Porsche nine elevens in this case. That’s I think Peter, Greg being chased by Juan Montalvo and a two liter escort from Europe. These were little GT cars and we mixed ’em up with the big GT cars. And next thing you know, in 1972, there was the Camel gt, which RJ Reynolds Tobacco came in, recognized it as a good product and away that went.

The other thing we did was we created a series for what was then the new little cars. So in this you got a Fiat, a Gremlin, a Mazda, a Pinto, and I think that’s a Volvo in the back. But John was astute enough and IMSA was a student enough to realize all these manufacturers had no place to race their new product.

So we created this and that’s when little cars, but I think the first Honda to ever race in the United States was a civic and imsa. Most of these brands, BMW and others just grew from this into gt cars and bigger cars. The American manufacturers, we had the Pinto, the Gremlin, and other similar cars. And what was great about this, they were running on street tires.

They took BFGs [00:06:00] initially, good years, shaved them down to three 30 seconds so they wouldn’t fall apart. And you could run around Daytona as an example. Tom Wall, in about 1975, did a closed course record at Talladega at over 150 miles an hour. And an A MC Hornet on street tires. Street tires on race cars, not new, but running a whole series on ’em was a relatively new idea.

So this grew great. It also provided the cars that could fill the back of the GT fields as that grew in 72 and 73, raced in the daytime, raced at night, and then we got into the mid seventies. By that point, people like Porsche, BMW Ford with their Capris. Most of the European manufacturers would build a limited run of customer race cars, Porsche Carreras or whatever.

Back then, I think Porsche made about 5,009 elevens a year. I think GM made about 300,000 Camaros. So to equate a Camaro with a Porsche was a technical. Problem. So John, and this is his original artwork, decided to apply what the [00:07:00] FIA applied to the European cars, to American cars. And he created more or less by himself all American gt.

This happens to be a Vega, which was replaced rapidly by the Chevy Mazda. And that became the mainstay, along with John Greenwood’s, big Corvettes to compete against the European brands. And that’s really where IMSA’s growth started in production car racing, which was GT cars. So that was the first A A GT car, which of course is a Vega.

Looks a little bit like the drawing, but that didn’t last long. And as back to more RS cars, this is a typical RS race at Daytona. In this same timeframe, car and driver Pinto is up there. Nick crawl, president of the SECA in the BMW in second, George Alderman who drove in the first formula forward race at Pocono is in the lead in turn one in the wet.

Lebanza Al Holbert doing an engine change during the 24 hour race, a planned engine change, which wasn’t really the best way to go about a 24 hour race, but they did it anyway. We did Formula Atlantic. We co sanctioned the Formula [00:08:00] Atlantic Series in the era of Vinu and Ray Hall and Elliot Forbes Robinson.

The Canadians did the Canadian races. IMSA did the US races. 1976. This is I think, the ski rule car that’s Vinu in the back. So this is 1976 Road Atlanta. Those of you who know the track will be stunned at what the place looked like in 1976, but you see Camaros, Porsches, la Manza. This was the Manza that first all around A A GT victory, Al Holbert in the car.

There’s four or five of these little two minute clips of video. And this wasn’t video. This was film because video hadn’t been invented yet. And just to show you what the tracks were like, what the cars looked like, and not just still pictures, but this car was the first mass produced tube frame race car before nascar, before anybody else.

14 of those were built. By Decon and three or four other constructors built cars to the same rules, but they had six liter Chevys in the front of a Chevy Mazda in a tube frame [00:09:00] chassis. But the car captured the look of the road car just as the CSL and the Corvette, which was the intent. Marketing wise.

The cars had to look like what they were supposed to look like. But you can see here the front straightaway at Atlanta, there’s no pit lane on the right as there is now. There actually was a stream over there where people would be periodically pulled out of the water and there we have it on. Al Holbert winning the first All American GT overall victory at Road Atlanta in 1976.

Those were the two main antagonists. That’s Michael Kaiser on the right with Milt Minner a lot of times, and Al Holbert who used Doc Bundy, a whole bunch of other drivers, but I didn’t want to talk too much about that, but beautiful car people remember them today and still go, you know what? For something from the mid seventies, it’s still kind of a current looking piece of hardware.

That was the antagonist for everybody, which is the Porsche, RSR. This is Mike Kaiser before he got the Mazda. But this car was sold in 1974. Brand new three liter Porsche, RSR was $23,000. Of course there’s inflation, but it still was a pretty good deal. The other great car, the air was the [00:10:00] C-S-L-B-M-W. This came about.

In 1975, the factory decided IMSA in the US was the place to race. So they gave up their touring car program in Europe and brought the whole mess. Ronnie Peterson, Brian Redmond, Zi, Alan Moffitt, they brought the whole factory deal over here. They came to Daytona, didn’t do too well. Moved into Bobby Allison shops in Hueytown, Alabama, and converted the cars from European touring cars to NASCAR stock cars with triple door bars and stiffened them all up, and then became the cars to beat because of that.

That’s a typical, let’s turn one at at Laguna in that same era, but Monza, Monza, BMW, Carl Schaeffer’s, big Block. Camaro. Porsche. Porsche, Porsche, Porsche, Porsche, Charlie, Kemp’s, Mustang, at the very top on the right, which was also an All American GT car. And then we decided we’d go stock car racing. So we invented American Challenge.

This is Gene Felton in a Buick Skylark. We didn’t know what we were gonna do with them, but we basically created a class, and I want to emphasize all of this stuff you see here, John Bishop and the staff at the time, we’d sit around and say, what do we need? To have for our product. Our [00:11:00] product is entertainment.

We’re not here to set the world on fire. We’re here to entertain people. Go to places like Road Atlanta and Road America and have people come and watch. This is all before television as well. So we created this, we ran ’em with our GT cars for a couple years, and then Kelly came along and we ran 10 years of.

Of American stock cars, which NASCAR tried to do at the same time. Didn’t court work out as well as ours did, but road racing stock cars was a new idea. Again, sat around one day and decided what do we need to do? We need something like that. We need these kind of cars to be on the racetrack in some way.

Again, this is Riverside BMW’s, out front Ford Capri behind Gaggle of Porsche’s. Great shot of Bert’s car. Beautiful cars, beautifully turned out. And then we got into group five. So now you see the beginning of the big wings and things, and the extended front splitters car in the back is Chris Cord’s Mazda.

The car in the front is David Hobbes and the McLaren BMW three 20. I turbo. Also a factory deal, but run out of McLaren in, in Detroit. Group five came along, and again, it was the same situation. The OE in Europe made nine [00:12:00] 30 fives, a few of these BMWs, and then they became the dominant cars. John Bishop always wanted a product that the little guy private team could win the big races in.

So Daytona Sebring, there had to be something that you were not dependent on a car company to have to have a car because after a year or two, those guys quit making ’em. So every generational shift technically in IMSA GT racing has been due to coming up with something new that would take the place of OE Manufacture built purpose race cars, and have it available to anybody who wanted to buy it.

And that was an underlying theme for five decades. That’s the other big monsters, the big Greenwood Corvettes. This particular car at Daytona in 1974 did 212 miles an hour. It pit in at Daytona. It’s the size of a small house that has a 494 cubic inch cross ram Can-Am engine in it. It’s got tires on the back big enough for a semi, but it was fast.

How did that work against the Porsches? Technically everybody got 32 gallons of gas. So 250 miles [00:13:00] at Daytona. This car was two to three seconds, a lap faster than most of the other cars, but had to make two more pit stops to get the fuel and what happened In the end, they converged, and the racing was really quite excellent because of that.

Another great shot at BMW at Sebring in the old days where you could see between the car and the big airplanes, there’s nothing. But that’s the way it was. Gives you an idea. That’s the winning car from 1975. But yeah, these constellations, DC sixes, DC sevens lined up there, they’re basically cutting them up for scrap, but there’s a little vestige of a snow fence there in front of the windscreen.

But there’s nothing between parked airplanes and the race cars. There’s a shot from Daytona same year where. There’s actually trees there, which of course have been long chopped up by spectators for firewood or whatever, but there’s no more trees in Daytona. Another good shot of Chris k Manza, mid Ohio.

Again, beautiful cars. This is now 1978 and this is a pretty important year technically. Two front row cars are factory 9 35 Porsches. One’s a customer car, which is Kramer, and the other one [00:14:00] is the martini factory car. Behind them are the two in all Terra GTP cars. GTP came about through a collaboration with the A CO and the Lamar people to develop a prototype car that a number of private constructors could build and powered by engines that anybody could buy.

So those two cars are powered by Cosworth, three Liter Cosworth, kind of a dune Formula one engine. They actually did pretty well, but a lot of people don’t understand that that was a collaboration with the A CO. It then led to bigger political issues in a few years with the FIA. But we’ll get to that. So every time we came out with new cars, Daytona’s the first race, it’s the Super Bowl race.

At no time did any new car. Beat the old cars at Daytona when they first came out until the DPI cars in the mid 20 teens. The car that won is a little 43 Hurley Haywood up there in the upper right Porsche Carre, RSR. It’s been in the game since 1974. It’s been four years and it’s still a competitive, big race winning car.

All this other stuff broke or crashed. So that’s part of it. Again, another shot [00:15:00] showing you. The first prototype of the turbo car is the Zero zero Car, which Interscope had, which was driven by Dan and Guy is Factory car, Kramer car, one of the GTP. In Alters. We talked about consequential racetracks, a couple shots from Lime Rock.

This is before the Chica. When you have 850 horsepower going up a hill. Wish was, I hate to say, kind of normal. There’s even a more dramatic one. These cars were, uh. Absolutely terrible to drive. You had to really be on your game. Very difficult to drive huge amount of power based on a standard nine 11 shell, kind of a flexible flyer until they got here and everybody stiffened them up.

Huge rear tires, tiny, small front tires. Aerodynamically, eh, not that good either. In those days you could run a twin turbo set up, or a single turbo set up with two different specifications of weight because of lag. No electronics existed yet to control turbo lag. So two small turbos. Worked a little better, but the big one made more power.

So this is a rare photograph of Peter Greg’s two cars, that road Atlanta, trying to decide which one he would race. One’s a single, one’s [00:16:00] a double. Then they morphed into, this is JLP three. They began to get Kramer body work, body work design in California. And I would say by 19 79 80, we’d have 15,930 fives on the grid.

One BMW, one or two Ford Mustang Z speed cars. But of the 15,930 fives, no, two of ’em the same. Every team got the cars hot, rotted ’em, changed them. The rules then philosophically were, if it didn’t say you couldn’t, you could, they had dry ice in the inner coolers. They had fon sprays in the intercos for qualifying, and everybody said they were cheating and we’re going, well, no, it doesn’t say you can’t do that.

So they’re just being a little more innovative than you are. Try it, see if it works for you. So it generated a lot of diversity. Hot rods. This is, uh, lagoon Deka. It’s Ray Hall on the Nine and Fitzpatrick. Whittington Brothers Ford, Zach. Speed Mustang pretty evenly matched in speed. Down the back straightaway at Daytona.

Little lock up there. Yo. But you could see Porsche, Porsche, Porsche, Porsche, Porsche, Porsche, [00:17:00] Porsche, Porsche, Paul Newman, and a Nissan Ford. Somebody crashing the end all car. But again, we got to another point where if you didn’t have a Porsche 9 35, which you could no longer get, you had to build one out of a wreck street car or something like that.

And that’s what they did. But we got to the point where it was all the same car with one or two exceptions. So we needed this GTP concept to generate. Something new, and that was the Lola T 600. Also, the first customer, GTP car built about 15 of those. That’s J, that’s the ultimate form of the the 9 35, which by then in 82, 83 was running full ground effects.

Still a rear engine car, but the only thing left that was a nine 11 would be the front windshield cow, and side windows. The rest of it, as you can see, is heavily different from a nine 11. Again, all allowed. Shot from Daytona. These cars were great. They had mechanical waste gates. They made all kinds of weird noises.

Spectators love them. They burned a lot of excess fuel through the turbo, so every time you got off the [00:18:00] engine, you got a big flame out the back. So it was kind of spectacular to watch these cars and hear them. They were not just a visual thing, they were a great sensory overload in every regard. RS cars.

They’re still around, running around on street tires. Now you see Dotson’s Gremlins still Gremlins Mazda in the back, BMW 2002. This series created an entire industry of people that IMSA tried to establish early on who then made their entire lives their business in racing. Roger Mandeville with Mazda’s, Amos Johnson, a number of people built their entire life and business.

Starting with these cars, we always had a place or always wanted a place. And this series in particular, along later with the Firestone Fire Hawk series, provided a place for the average guy to go racing. You didn’t have to be elite, you didn’t have to have a lot of money, but you could go out, you could have a great time.

And I wanna say up till this point, one of the things IMSA did was we paid everybody something. You might have won 50 bucks back then. [00:19:00] 50 bucks was two nights in a hotel room, so you could go to registration on Sunday afternoon and get paid in cash to get home. But we did that for a decade. It was a completely novel thought process that you would actually get paid to do this even if you were last.

But that was the philosophy. We paid everybody and it was appreciated. You also got an apple at registration. When you went to get your credentials. You got Peggy Bishop would give you an apple. So that was kind of cool too. So this is a typical RS race at Daytona. Mob racing. The only thing that made it better than Formula Fours is they had fenders and the wheels didn’t come off.

So there was a lot, a lot of stuff about that, but there’s probably 10 different kinds of cars in that picture. But that was what it was all about. You know, little guys racing who then became big guys later on, and that was really important to us to make that possible. Road America First Race. Road America 500 took us a while to crack the Cliff Tufty wall as well.

But finally they realized that if they wanted to do this, they had to have a bigger race than what they had at the time. But this is the Road America 501st year. See the crowd’s [00:20:00] great. The little BMW won that race 500 miles. It’s the longest it ever ran and its entire career, which is pretty good. The pit lane, no speed limit.

A lot of brave people in my opinion, but that’s what it looks like. That’s Fitzpatrick, leaving him from a fuel stop. But that’s the old pagoda, which when, uh, Lee Hall, who was the president at the time, said they were gonna take it down, I volunteered to fly to Wisconsin so that I could light the fire on one end that would burn it to the ground, which was the easiest way to get rid of it.

Mazdas were huge technical innovations with rotary engines. They provided a 330 horsepower car for virtually nothing in money compared to piston engines, and we had lots of ’em that’s cant racing. Uh, Lee Mueller, Kathy Rud, another weird great car, the R five Turbo by Patrick, Chuck Mart. Unfortunately, he.

Was killed in it at Midio testing, but this was one of the other interesting cars that Im SA fostered sometimes writing special rules for special manufacturers to enable them to be there. The Zak speed Mustangs, again, blowing a lot of [00:21:00] unused gas out the exhaust pipe. Klaus Ludwig, Ray Hall, Kevin Cogan, great Cars, two liter turbos.

It’s gotten kind of complicated at this point. Some of the other fun things that happened. This is testing Fitzpatrick’s nine 30 5K three the week before Lama on the highway in German. So the crews would go over and build up these cars at Kramer and then take ’em right to Lama, but you had to run ’em a little bit.

So took it out on the Audubon, gave it a little stroll down the highway, right? With a Volkswagen next to it. So if you read the sign, let’s see, Doman, yeah, calm, they were, weren’t calm, basically. A lot of that stuff went on all the time. Sometimes here, but in Europe it was routine to get a cake plate, which is a Kramer plate.

It was a dealer plate, but they just stuck it on the race car and took it out on the highway. So at this point, 82, we have three series. We have Camel GT Champion, spark Plug was the RS Cars. We had a 15 year relationship with that company. 12 years with Kelly Kelly Services with the Kelly American Challenge.

And at this point we started working with Skip Barber on this Barber Sob series Open Wheel Cars, which generated people like Diego [00:22:00] Montoya, Juan Montoya, Brian hurt a lot of IndyCar people. Paul Tracy ran in Skip Barber’s beginning Pro series, but that was just starting and we were just contemplating another shot of Road America.

Crowds were starting to get quite large at this time. Late eighties, early nineties. The 9 35 kept morphing into more bizarre high speed. This is a Moby Dick version actually. It’s the end dial car done in Preston Hens colors at Road America, which you could see it’s quite a long way from a nine 11. It’s flatter, wider.

And then came this piece. This is the Lola T 600, which was the first production series built GTP car. Eric broadly told Brian Redmond, I need two orders. These cars cost $75,000 in 1981. Get me two orders and we’ll build them. And they ended up building about 15 of them. This was run by Garson Enterprises who had run Porsches and basically Brian Redmond won the first race as a true ground effects car with tunnels, which was fairly new concept at that time.

How differently the [00:23:00] car could use the racetrack over a conventional car. The downforce and aerodynamic development, two biggest changes in this kind of racing in 40 years are tire development and aero development. The engines made 800 horsepower 45 years ago that no big deal. Cheaper to make that power these days.

But arrow and tires is what move these kind of cars. And in some cases you’ll see outside the boundaries of what the race tracks could handle. John and Bill France always had a theory that the car needed to be bigger than the track, and that worked until something. Bad happened and then you had to kinda rethink that philosophy.

So by the late eighties, these kind of cars had morphed into going to every racetrack We went, for instance here before the bus stop, the end of the back strait away was about 210 Laguna Seca before they made the inner loop turned two up the hill at the bridge, 205. Mid Ohio, two 10. Every track we went to the cars were faster than Indy cars, and at the tracks we shared, like at Road America and Portland Cars actually did faster lap times in an [00:24:00] Indy car.

We were pushing that envelope by the late eighties. But again, some views very simple. This is kind of, those are familiar with Lola’s. It’s kind of like a Lola T 70 from the sixties tub with a six liter Chevy V eight. This is a Franz Lease Chaparral engine car. 75 grand. The engines were like 35, 40 grand.

So Porsche 9 35 when you could last buy one was well over $200,000 from Porsche. And this was a much more cost effective. Most of the teams that got these were not OE manufacturer related, but they were race teams. And when the business of racing and we were trying to create an environment where they could be successful as teams with sponsors and everything else.

So we kept morphing to new cars and everybody says, well, how did you think of this? Pretty simple. We needed a car that was half the price that could perform as good or better than what already existed. And then we figured out moving backwards from that end point of how to get there techniques. And what was frightening is none of us were engineers, but there were simple pieces of this, which were, the engine had [00:25:00] to be made available to anybody who wanted to buy it.

Car had to have two distinct things. It had to carry 32 gallons of gas. The driver’s feet had to be behind the center line of the front axles when the pedals were depressed. This was the era where India and F1 guys all had broken feet and legs ’cause they stuck out and they were the first thing to hit the fence.

And when they went into it. But you can watch this video from Laguna of how this car could just kind of drive around people. That’s Danny and guys in a Porsche. He just drove by him like he was tied to a tree. That’s John Paul. Same thing. He’s taking an outside line and turn 10 that you don’t normally do.

You’re in the inside and he just drove by and it’s all because of the ground. There’s another good shot of watch how it’s squares off these corners compared to the Porsche. It just was an amazing revelation because people didn’t realize what the impact of that technology would be until they saw it and went, oh.

We need to get one of these. So that was sort of the end of the 9 35. This is the first race that the car raced in and it won. It started fifth. Brian Redmond worked his way through the field, not by going any faster, but the speed the car could run. You [00:26:00] could run the whole race at, well, the nine 30 fives, the Fords, all those other cars had tire degradation.

They had too much power on two back wheels. These cars have the right amount of power, the right weight and the arrow package just made ’em really good. Another limerock shot. This is, uh, one of the coolest cars we ever developed with Audi, which also became the biggest pain in the butt for us. But this is, uh, the Audi 90 GTO car, full tube frame, five cylinder inline turbo hunch Stook, Hurley Haywood, and occasionally Walter Royal, the rally driver, who even people like hunch Stook said when he showed up.

I raced for second. The man was amazing. So this is Lime Rock again, doing wheelies up the hill. The intriguing thing was constant all-wheel drive car, which meant it applied the drive you wanted on each wheel based on the grip level that the car was sensing that it needed. It wasn’t 20% front, 80% back, it was applying that drive to the wheels as it saw it needed.

So the hard part of it was we started it out. Goodyear made ’em special tires. 14 inches wide. We realized after a couple [00:27:00] races, they didn’t go to Daytona and Sebring because they didn’t think they could finish. So. They started on 14th. We summed down two, three races, changed that to 12 and then changed it to 10, a couple races later, and the end result was, it made no difference.

The 10 inch wide tires work just as good as the 14 inch tire. Part of the reasons and the learning experience for us was technically what’s going on with a car like this is the tire degradation is way better. The load of slowing down is spread over all four wheels. The braking was much better. And the acceleration was phenomenal.

And there’s some video of people like Ook would just pass people in the dirt or the grass because the car could do that. So the rest of the guys are like, what’s he doing? He just drove me around me on the dirt. So it was an amazing car. It is probably, in my opinion, one of the coolest, most technically advanced things that IMSA created.

We did some other stuff, but this one was sort of a challenge for them and us to do this. They won the TransAm the year before with a car, an Audi 100. Made out of a real production shell. [00:28:00] This has nothing to do with that other than the greenhouse silhouette and so on, so forth. But spectacular Car two remain.

One is here in USA and one is in Germany. And the significance to Audi is when they just showed their first concept Formula One car, the car that’s behind the Formula one car in their display is that car, not the R eight prototype. That’s off to the side, but that car is right there. That embodies Audi’s performance thing, and it’s 1989.

Pretty amazing what they were able to do and how they did it. So more pictures. Here’s the L is now taken the front all the time. And then Bob Tulia showed up with Jaguars with Big V 12 engines. One of the only teams in history whose people were always dressed in white and never got dirty. Not sure how they did that, but I think they had enough uniforms in the truck that if you did, you had to go change right away.

But yeah. How many people have white crew guys, you know, beautiful car. Lee Drester design actually originated by Mike Dale, who was the head of uh, Jaguar, USA, had nothing to do with England. They didn’t want anything to do with it, so they did it here themselves [00:29:00] again. One of IMSA’s goals was to provide the industry designers constructors, the opportunity to make a living and a business in this kind of race.

So another example of that beautiful car. This is the hairpin at Miami. In the first treat races, which is the next sort of episode where we talked about racing on roads. Well, it came back with a vengeance in the eighties. At one point we had five downtown street races. Different concept, which was we’re gonna bring this show to people.

In their face, which is gonna mess up their town for at least a month so they’ll know it’s happening. Okay? The buses didn’t run. It was, we messed everything up. But when all said and done, we turned on a lot of people to the game that would not have otherwise ever seen it, and it was spectacular to watch another innovation.

The first plastic engine, it was tour on two liter. Most of the internal components are carbon or plastic, sponsored by Amaco. It actually got two podium finishes in Camel Lights. This is also early eighties. So we had a lot of innovative stuff going on and welcomed it. You know, we looked at what [00:30:00] we did as a place for people to try new things.

Some of ’em worked, some of ’em didn’t. But I threw this in here only because a lot of people don’t know about it, but. It actually scored two third places in a pretty competitive category in an engine made outta plastic. This is interesting. This is John Bishop’s original drawing, which he drew in the meeting when we started arguing with Porsche between the 9 5 6 group C car and our desire for a different kind of car.

So what’s different? We put out our GTP rules with the A CO in 1980. It required that engine to be available, no aluminum roll cages, which the FIA insisted was okay, which never was. Everyone we ever saw failed and the driver had to be behind the front axle. John actually sketched this in the boardroom at Porsche Stuttgart and showed it to him and says, here, you can lengthen it in the back or you can lengthen it in the front, but you gotta make it longer to get the driver moved.

And you can’t have aluminum roll cages, and you gotta have an engine that everybody can get. So the group C formula, for those who don’t know, was a fuel formula, more [00:31:00] endurance championship Lama took kind of the same thing, the 56 version, the group C car, which was shorter driver out front, the one that Stefan Beov was killed in its spa.

And it probably, I don’t wanna say it would be avoidable, but the way he was positioned in the car and what happened to the car was tragic. Should not have been that bad, but it did. They lasted about two years. And then finally after some bad accidents in Group C, they adopted IMSA’s GTP rules because it made sense.

And again, none of us are engineers, but we just looked at this thing and said. This can’t be right. There is a better way to do this, and we just did what we thought was correct. 9 56 is probably the least successful Porsche car in that regard. In the 62, I think they built 145 of them. So you think about that 145 race cars that started at about 300 grand and at the end a decade later were 700 grand, but they still built 145 of ’em and sold them.

So that’s what the fields kind of look like. You got a Porsche Buick, March Jaguars. We had a lot of diversity. We had nine OE manufacturers in [00:32:00] GTP in the eighties, as well as, I think five or six more in Camel Light, which was a lower division using normally aspirated engines, which is kind of where the gentleman guys went ’cause it was an easier car.

These things started getting really fast. Miami, this is what street racing was like in the early eighties. Biscayne Boulevard. On the right pit lanes to the left. You could see cars coming around. Turn one. It was amazing to do this. I remember the first race had Sterling Moss as the color commentator on tv, and he was just fascinated because street racing at that point was pretty much Monaco.

That was it. So we did this, then we did West Palm, then we did San Antonio, then we did Columbus, then we did New Orleans, and we just kept going. And the economic benefit was huge. The pushback from people whose businesses got messed up and couldn’t get on the bus and everything else was equally great.

Noise wasn’t that big of an issue because everybody knew it was gonna be noisy. Just to give you an example, race control, the high rise building on the left was a new building and we were like 20 stories up and had a commanding [00:33:00] view of the entire area. This is right along Biscayne Bay. The cruise ship port is to the left.

It was just spectacular. Great idea. Firestone Fire Hawk. All right, other great idea. We took street cars. Told everybody to take the carpets out, put a bolt-in, roll cage in it that you could take out. If we ask you to take out, in other words, it could not be firmly affixed to the car. It had to be bolted in steel fire bottle.

That was it. Belts and a seat. Go race it. So those were street cars, which everybody said there’s no fuel cells, there’s none of this, none of that. The standard of construction of these cars in that day was such that they were. Five layers of steel around the fuel tank already. It was past the Ford Pinto I explode experiences of a decade earlier.

They were pretty solid cars. We’d roll these things up and what was cool is you could wreck it on a test day, go down a dealership, buy another one, and build it overnight and go race the next day. How bad was that? But you could see there’s Dodge Chargers, BMWs, Camaros, Mustangs, just about everything you could.

Now, what happened over time? We had three or four categories. [00:34:00] Each category, we listed a group of cars, and out of that group, maybe three or four were really in that configuration, competitive with each other. Some of them were just hopeless. You didn’t wanna run eos, they were terrible, but people tried.

Picture of a Jaguar V 12, six and a half and seven liter engines based on the production Jaguar engine. Beautiful sound, very competitive. Another great picture from Sebring where you can see this Porsche is going down hangar straight at about 180. And there are people sitting in the grass to the left, and then there’s a chain link fence, and then there’s more people.

And somehow we didn’t manage to kill anybody, though. We certainly had all the parts to do that. No big accidents, but not what we do today. But this is about mid eighties. Bruce Levin’s car, Daytona at night. Just a cool shot. That’s a Nissan GTP car in the last one. And an interesting thing is the what shown this week.

Of course, with endurance racing, we got the moniker of Racing with a Difference. We race at night and we race in the rain, and sometimes we race at night in the rain, which makes it really nasty. What I’m [00:35:00] trying to illustrate here is just how people have adapted these cars to take on different race lengths, different kinds of racetrack, angling the lights out so that you could see where the wall was, was essential.

This is pre-live tv. During the races, so now it’s lit somewhat better. You can actually drive Daytona at night without headlights. People can’t see you coming, but you could see where you’re going. But back then you had to have lights and they had to work and they had to work this way. And places like Sebring, the old 5.2 mile track, part of which was that 86 Havelin car.

If you lost your headlights or your alternate or your battery went dead, there were times where guys just stopped and had to wait till the end of a session ’cause they couldn’t find their way back to the pits. That dark, certainly at speed, you wouldn’t even try to pretty, uh, heroic if you won there in those conditions.

As a driver, it was not just consequential, it was heroically consequential. Okay. Castrol Jag. These are the English cars from Walkinshaw. They replaced Jaguar finally adopted the GTP concept for Group C as well, so they were able to build new cars. Came in a variety of forms, V [00:36:00] twelves at seven liters, twin turbo v sixes.

The XJR 14, which comes up later was the Ross Bra Design Formula One designers version of a car powered by a Cosworth. But really super big program. Castrol, yours truly at the Ferrari Museum. I throw this in there for my own benefit, but I was the guy that had to go over there and homologate this car, Ferrari F 40, which is 1989 to run in GT racing, both in the US and Europe.

So whenever I go back there, they always remind me I did two cars with Ferrari. That one in the 3 3 3 SP prototype, which will come up in a bit. So this one sits in the Ferrari museum. Hurley Haywood actually drove it. People don’t realize that Hurley Haywood drove Audis. He drove Porsches, he drove Ferraris, he drove Jaguars.

He drove a lot of stuff, but he lives and breathes Porsches great guy. Daytona Castro, banking early in the morning. They won in 90 and in 88. Another beautiful piece. The ni Nissans hard to miss these cars. This is the second generation GTP car. Okay? This has got some nasty, uh, accident stuff in it. This is where I talk about how the cars exceeded the racetrack.[00:37:00]

What’s going on here is Road. Atlanta has not got a chicane. It is a flat out turn seven to turn, what is now 12, run 210. There’s a dip in the middle, the dip and the downforce. At this point, these cars were running 7,500 to 8,000 pounds rear springs. They needed springs like that to keep the car from grinding into the road.

That plus the weight of the car. You go down to a in a dip at 200 miles an hour, what’s gonna happen? The tires are gonna explode. It’s a little gruesome, but nobody got seriously hurt. Same race, both cars. There was a third one with the Toyota, which managed to get back to the pits ’cause it landed right side up.

These guys didn’t Pretty destructive. So this is when we started thinking about, okay, this stuff is simply going too fast. We don’t need to go that fast to put on a quality show. To put on good entertainment. We’re not in the business of wrecking this stuff this way. After that particular race, Goodyear refused to supply tires to these teams until they told them actually what the downforce potential would be.

’cause the cars just [00:38:00] exceeded what they could possibly do. So some other footage from this era, Holbert was the dominant car, the eighties followed by the Nissans in the late eighties. One of IMSA’s most iconic car, low and brow car. John Lamers put that one in the fence when he went out of the pits with cold tires and new brake pads.

Oops. Which is still happening today at Daytona Sebring. Again, that’s turn one. Before there was the change in the track, the original Nissan GTP car. So at this point we had five or six major factory teams. We, once again, were struggling with a private tier, could not get the hardware to be able to compete with these people.

Starting to think about what’s next when this goes. We also were made aware at the time that RJ Reynolds, because of federal law, would have to stop their sponsorship in 1993. So we had a number of things going on into the next decade. The bishops and the original stockholders, the Francis and two other groups of stockholders sold IMSA to a businessman in Tampa, who was also the promoter of the St.

Pete Grand Prix race. Mike Cohen and Jeff Parker. It wasn’t the best idea. Neither one of ’em were [00:39:00] racers. If you wanna read the gory details, I wrote a book about it with George Silverman, Mike Compatriot with this, they would do stuff like Mike was a construction guy, so he would take the purse for the 24 hours a Daytona, and he would use that to bond jobs for the state of Florida.

I could say this now because when he finally got caught up, he did 15 years state and 15 years federal, non concurrent. Just got outta jail about two years ago. It was strange days, but basically he lasted three years and then basically sold to another guy who actually was a great guy, Charlie Slater, but the guy who talked Charlie Slater into buying it.

It was the same guy that talked Mike Cone into buying it. He was the promoter at Tampa and St. Pete, both of which were temporary circuit events that failed mid nineties. In spite of all these underlying bad things going on, we exported our GT stuff first to Japan and we took, uh, anywhere from six to eight cars and helped the JAF develop what is now super gt super GT cars are essentially derivatives of the car on the right, which [00:40:00] is a 300 ZX Cunningham car built in California.

Just to show them this Nissan set this up at Fuji. There’s the road car, there’s the race car. The whole idea was to capture the spirit of the streetcar, but make it a real race car that makes it cheaper to run. We brought six or seven cars at their request. We ran two years at Fuji, one year at auto topless, I think.

So three races where they started running, uh, Nismo Skylines. A modified group A cars and started developing a tube frame structured car, which then grew into what they do now, which is very similar to this, even beyond that, without much help from us, other than bringing a variety of GTO and GTU cars and American iron and opening them up and letting all the, their mo OE manufacturers just come and look at the cars and ask questions, how they made, what do you use, and so on and so forth.

It too developed their own industry of parts and component manufacturers for their own cars, which is great. That was one of the big goals of IMSA was always to focus on that. Chevy Intrepid, Wayne Taylor, 1991. [00:41:00] 1991, was the most successful GTP year because every OE manufacturer won at least one race, which rarely happened.

The last nine 60 twos. This is Rob Dyson’s. Quite a bit different than the earlier Holbrook pictures, A lot more arrow stuff on it. Triple element wing on the back, which originally was one element. The car won races in 1984, and it won its final race in 1993. And the reason I bring that up is the original layout of A GTP car.

John Bishop drew on a piece of paper in his office in front of myself, Roger Bailey and Charlie Rainville, and that drawing remained in the IMSA Rule book for a decade. Unchanged. So when people talk about stability, people like Rob Dyson invested in these cars and he raced them for 10 years. Modified ’em, but it’s the American hot rod mentality.

You gotta fix it somehow. There’s the XJR 14 brilliant car. Look at the size of the arrow device. On the back of that. The spray gives you some idea what’s going on, but the air going under the car. This car, Davey Jones said many times, 73 to 7,500 pound rear springs on it. But it’s basically a Formula One car with a three and a half liter engine.[00:42:00]

Widen tub holding 32 gallons of gas. Great little car, super quick. Davey Jones was one of our really good drivers, but the best company I ever heard was Tony Dow, who managed the British cars, said uh, Davey Jones has wrecked every model of GTP and Group C car we’ve ever made at least once. So you know, you got guys that are really fast, but you gotta expect them to damage the hardware occasionally or total it as he did a few times.

Then came the Toyota’s. This is gurney’s effort. These cars were culmination of three generations of previous designs that became the dominant cars. What’s really unique about this car is if you notice, there’s no holes in it other than the hole in the front. All of the air going through the car created, added down force inside the car on a second floor, all the air for the radiators, intercos, and the only thing sticking out of those two little black things, which are brake ducts for the rear brake, but everything else went through the car.

The tall scoop on the side was an intake for the turbo, just because it needed the cleaner air, because at the time the air got from the front to the engine bay for the turbo was [00:43:00] pretty agitated. These cars also ran 7,500 pound springs. It was a 2.1 liter engine running 125 inches of boost and could make if they wanted a thousand horsepower out, a two liter.

They didn’t run that long that way, but it was there if you wanted it. Great cars having gurney in the series from GTU to GTO to GTP for close to a decade was a treat. Wonderful man. That was the year they won 24 hours, 93. We had carbon breaks by then, as you can see. So Japan, here’s the group of cars we took to our topless.

Seven of them, the whole group. That was a lot of fun. The Japanese were great hosts, but they also, you know, you see some of them, we had Exxon at that time instead of Camel. So because it was international, half the cars had so on it because they were still using Theso name overseas and not here, but Exxon was the US that’s pouring rain at Fuji Lightener, GTU car and the two Cunningham, GTO cars in the.

This is another weird car. This is the most successful Porsche car ever raced. This is the [00:44:00] Jaguar Bud Light car that you saw earlier. With the rain coming out the back, they cut the roof off of it. Well, first what they did was they sold that car to Mazda, who ran it in Group C with a Mazda badged Cosworth engine, same car, but they changed it from a Jag to a Mazda just by putting Mazda covers on the engine.

And they did that for about three, four months and decided that wasn’t worth it. So Val Perez, Indiana, they had two or three of these chassis and. Tony Dow Max Welty, who was the Porsche head of Motorsport at Allen Springer in California, go. We need to do something with these. What’d they do? They drop the 9 62 spec engine in the back of one of these things, which cut the roof off.

Reinforced the roll cage structures you could see with forward and rear braces. This is Mario Andrei testing it at Charlotte and it’s the most successful car because in 1995 with the beginning of world sports cars, which side story? We knew in 93 no more GTP cars. So we had a new sponsor, which was Exxon.

They had two requests, make the cars look different because we don’t want to be viewed as taking over someone else’s old stuff. And [00:45:00] two, we need more of ’em. So the whole idea, again, was another technical shift to develop a car that private teams could buy and run. And so the World Sports Car was born. I bring this one up because it’s so unique.

It only raced in our races once after the roar. The test at Daytona in the beginning of January. Kramer had a CK five, which was a similar car made out of a 9 62 chassis. He brought one. Porsche brought two of these and we changed the rules on ’em between then and the race because we recognized that we really didn’t set up world sports cars for turbos.

We were trying to extend an arm to Lamar to go, you need to get rid of what you were now running, which are GT one cars and McLaren F ones. Porsche GT one cars, which at the time cost about $1.5 million a piece unavailable to everybody. Factory made so many and that was it done. So you’re limiting your field.

You’re not looking forward about how you’re gonna sustain this. So we needed cars like this that customer cars could be made out of existing stuff. So it never raced at Daytona that [00:46:00] year. However, the Kramer CK five, the older version, won the race under the rules that Porsche didn’t like with the same engine.

I say it’s the most successful. It ran Lama twice, won both times. Finish second. A third time, and then no finish. Second at Petite Lamont. 19 98, 3 years later, we also extended a series to, um, central and South America, the NA Cam, Marlboro GT series. Again, IMSA Cars, IMSA Rules, IMSA teams, a place for them to sell their cars.

Another good view of the World Sports Car taking the roof off. That’s, uh, Andy Wallace, or might be Derek. And you could kind of see who was driving the car and what he was driving it with. So it was kind of a good view. James Weaver and Rob Dyson’s Spice with a Ferrari engine in it. Again, all that stuff was generally available.

Wayne Taylor won the first championship in a rotary powered car by not winning a race, but finishing in the top five, I think, 12 times. The car of the decade is clearly the 3, 3, 3 sp. This car again, I went to Ferrari with Jumpier. Met with Montezemolo and Pirro Ferrari and said, we need a customer car. So they committed to making this car solely [00:47:00] for customers.

Ferrari never ran one themselves. Pure customer car is exactly what we wanted. It wasn’t that expensive as Pirro Ferrari said. The little badge on the front end, that’s $25,000 just to get the little badge on it ’cause it’s a Ferrari badge. So there was a little inflation to that. But you bought a car, you got an engine.

Four corners, and a full body and a transmission. For about three quarters of a million dollars and that was most of the parts you needed to run a whole season, including the car. It’s a great deal. Rob Dyson. The other great car was the Riley. Many engine combinations in it. Great shot of the Ferrari. They spit flames out the back and made great noises with a V 12 turning 12,500 RPM.

It’s magic spectators loved them. GT cars still the mainstay. 99 Audi and BMW showed up at this point. The A CO and the FIA adopted IMSS W World Sports Car Rules, but then had to put their mark on it so they put bigger engines in it and put aerodynamic diffusers on ’em on cars that weren’t designed to have ’em, which immediately obsoleted all the Ferrari and made the Audi and the BM BMW cars.

That’s a six liter V 12, the car to [00:48:00] have. As you can see here, all the old cars are in the back. The two Panos is the two BMWs. The Lowell is a new car, but then you got the Ferrari’s and the Riley’s in the back, and they could no longer compete with the cars at the front. Grand Dam comes along 19 99, 19 97.

George Silverman and I left when Andy Evans acquired imsa, which was the fifth owner in seven years, and decided we didn’t like to work under his ethics. So IMSA got split in half. Half of the people, the management and. Director type level people ended up in NASCAR Daytona, the rank and file people, part-time.

People that ran the races as race staff ended up getting the contract to run the A LMS with Don Panos program. Again, new car. We had to get rid of the old world sports cars again. Grand Dam did Daytona prototypes. Interesting design Ford. Lexus. Lexus. Ford. That’s Adorn, which became a Dara Riley. So what happened there was the benefit Grand Am had was at the time International Speedway Corporation.

We had Daytona, we had Watkins Glen, we had [00:49:00] Phoenix, we had Fontana, we had racetracks that we owned that let us race there reasonably. The A LMS had Sebring in Atlanta, and we both would pick up mid Ohio or Three Rivers or some other events to build out a schedule. We used to go to the Glen twice. We used to go to Daytona twice, but basically for about six or seven years, these two things ran in parallel with opposite philosophies.

One was cost effective, lots of cars, all prototypes in that shot, there’s no GT cars. A LMS had OE Manufacturers spending a lot of marketing dollars. But they didn’t have very big fields or lots of cars. They had a connection with LAMA and eventually, by the early teens, I don’t wanna say one was better than the other, they were two different philosophies.

But Grand Am had pretty much caught up and passed TV viewership on the car count, and on the spectator attendance at events. And then the smarter people got involved and said, why don’t we combine these two things and make something better? And that’s where we are today. We also did some cool stuff. This is Mike Shank, breaking the World Close Course Speed [00:50:00] record at Daytona, which was held for 20 something years by the Mercedes C one 11 done at Nardo in Italy, which I think is a seven mile or nine mile oval.

He beat it with a three liter eco-boost turbo production engine. You could see the line. You could see the four decimal points, pretty high tech stuff when we would do stuff like that along the lines of Bonneville. Then DP version three. These are the Corvettes. The final version, there were three generations of DP cars and A LMS.

You have the Audi, the Corvettes. They were definitely the A LMS cars. Panos. This is a classic end of race. This is Yorg Burmeister, and I forget who’s driving the Corvette. It’s not very friendly at all, as you can about to see. Oh yeah. See that? That’s a wall that was to the flag. So the Porsche won the race.

The Corvette was second, but crossed the line backwards shedding parts, but luckily I didn’t have to have anything to do with that. Vipers another Corvette. Beautiful cars. Now we’re getting near the end. This is D-P-I-D-P-I [00:51:00] followed the merger between two years of running A LMS and Grand Am Cars together, and then creating a new car.

This is very similar to the car we have now without the hybrids. So at this point, IMSA is starting to really boom. When I say boom, record crowds great TV numbers, social media is, is exploding and it just grew from this point to where we are today. This was last lap at Petite Lamar. Diehard passed, but he’s going so slow.

The car he is trying to pass past them going down the hill and he still finished second. We don’t push for that, but it’s so competitive and so close. People talk about BOP and all the rule stuff. We’re working margins of 0.03%. Where some of the teams, the two drivers cannot drive the same car on the same day within that number, and yet the manufacturers want us to fix that.

It’s like, no, some ending ones. We do this now every year at Daytona. That’s the field for the Rolex 24, probably two years ago. Turn one SE bring just GT cars this time. Huge. We have 18 OEM [00:52:00] partnership agreements with car manufacturers. Most of anyone in the world right now, Penske’s, Porsches, Roger Penske, said when they first tested this car in Barcelona, these are the most technically advanced race cars on the planet, including Formula One, IndyCar.

Anything else? They are made with stuff that was not off the shelf. Everything in these cars, hybrid wise, battery wise, MGU Wise was developed specifically for this. Again, in order to have a life until now, 2030. So we’ll be using this componentry and it has scalability for another five years. Easy. Cars are really cool.

They do really great things. They leave the pits on the electric, they have no alternator, and they just hit the ignition button and the car starts itself from the electric. It’s got an 800 volt battery in it. The 800 volt battery can give it 150 more horsepower, not on demand, but over a period of time.

It regenerates itself when you’re on the brakes and when you disengage the clutch, the input shaft, that’s where the MGU works is the input shaft BMWs. They just debuted [00:53:00] their second generation of the car at Daytona last weekend. Here you have Aston Martin, and again, off we go. So Daytona tells us the Rolex 24 now is the second most profitable event at the racetrack after the Daytona 500.

So road racing and sporty car stuff has come a long way, but you can see how quick these things are at Daytona. Now they’re slightly over 200. I threw this in just to give some idea of IMSA and the Corvette from the third car from the top. It is all IMSA, A LMS, grand Am. Corvettes first two? No, the third one is a Greenwood, so that’s where it starts, but it’s kind of a neat photo to show how GM is used.

Motorsports and Corvette, final picture, that’s the Bishop France trophy. Every champion of every class. In the overall division, G-T-O-G-T-U-G-T-X-G-T-P, on the front straightaway in front of the new tower building at Road Atlanta with the Michelin man on it. And uh, I’m done. Thank you.[00:54:00]

Where all the pictures came from. I am sure there’s some questions, mark. That was absolutely fabulous and I don’t know if we wanna open it up for questions. How old were you when you started, uh, with John Bishop? I was, had just turned 16 in the spring of 1974 and I did my 50th 24 hour race this year of only two years.

One year I was actually kind of helping John Cooper at the Speedway after Andy Evans took over. George and I went over there at their request and then by 99 I was over there regularly beginning to make Grand Am for. Bill Junior and Jim Franz been a great run. I think the most important thing, which I could talk to, you know, the cars are cool and the events are cool and I took a lot of notes, but the people.

Do you have the opportunity to work with your parents, John and Peg Bishop? Priceless. You know, I’ve been given great guidance, great teachings was told. Day one, you can make every mistake you want. Once, second time we’re gonna start thinking you’re stupid. And I said, okay, I don’t wanna be stupid. That was direct quote.[00:55:00]

This episode is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center. Its charter is to collect, share, and preserve the history of motor sports spanning continents, eras, and race series. The Center’s collection embodies the speed, drama and camaraderie of amateur and professional motor racing throughout the world.

The Center welcomes serious researchers and casual fans alike to share stories of race drivers race series, and race cars captured on their shelves and walls, and brought to life through a regular calendar of public lectures and special events. To learn more about the center, visit www.racing archives.org.

This episode is also brought to you by the Society of Automotive Historians. They encourage research into any [00:56:00] aspect of automotive history. The SAH actively supports the compilation and preservation of papers, organizational records, print ephemera, and images to safeguard, as well as to broaden and deepen the understanding of motorized wheeled land transportation.

Through the modern age and into the future. For more information about the SAH, visit www.auto history.org. We hope you enjoyed another awesome episode of Break Fix Podcasts, brought to you by Grand Tour Motorsports. If you’d like to be a guest on the show or get involved, be sure to follow us on all social media platforms at Grand Touring Motorsports.

And if you’d like to learn more about the content of this episode, be sure to check out the follow on article@gtmotorsports.org. We remain a commercial free and no annual fees organization through our sponsors, but also through the generous [00:57:00] support of our fans, families, and friends through Patreon. For as little as $2 and 50 cents a month, you can get access to more behind the scenes action, additional pit stop, minisodes and other VIP goodies, as well as keeping our team of creators.

Fed on their strict diet of fig Newton’s, Gumby bears, and monster. So consider signing up for Patreon today at www.patreon.com/gt motorsports. And remember, without you, none of this would be possible.

Highlights

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

00:00 Meet Mark Raffauf
02:14 IMSA Origins Bishop & Bill France
03:55 First Races Open Wheel
04:53 Closed Wheel Camel GT, Small Cars w/ Street Tires
06:32 All American GT Era
10:42 American Challenge Stock Cars
11:39 Group 5 Turbo Monsters
13:48 GTP Arrives Daytona 1978
15:20 935 Evolution And Innovation
18:11 Privateers Payout Philosophy and the Road America Breakthrough
22:29 Lola T600 Ground Effects
26:14 Audi 90 GTO Quattro
28:28 Jaguars Take Over
29:11 Street Races: Miami and the Downtown street racing boom!
29:42 Wild tech experiments
30:13 GTP rules vs Group C
33:06 Firehawk showroom racers
34:47 Night racing survival
36:54 When speed got dangerous
38:46 Ownership turmoil and exports
40:57 GTP peak and aero wars
44:49 World Sports Car era
46:46 Ferrari 333SP dominance
48:11 Split into Grand Am and ALMS
50:57 Merger to modern IMSA
51:49 Hybrids and today’s grid
53:53 Closing remarks and sponsors

Livestream

In case you missed it, please enjoy the original recording of: The International Motor Sports Association: 55 Years of Motorsports Influence and History by Mark Raffauf

This episode is sponsored in part by: The International Motor Racing Research Center (IMRRC), The Society of Automotive Historians (SAH), The Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argetsinger Family – and was recorded in front of a live studio audience.

Learn More

Michael R. Argetsinger Symposium on International Motor Racing History

The International Motor Racing Research Center (IMRRC), partnering with the Society of Automotive Historians (SAH), presents the annual Michael R. Argetsinger Symposium on International Motor Racing History. The Symposium established itself as a unique and respected scholarly forum and has gained a growing audience of students and enthusiasts. It provides an opportunity for scholars, researchers and writers to present their work related to the history of automotive competition and the cultural impact of motor racing. Papers are presented by faculty members, graduate students and independent researchers.The history of international automotive competition falls within several realms, all of which are welcomed as topics for presentations, including, but not limited to: sports history, cultural studies, public history, political history, the history of technology, sports geography and gender studies, as well as archival studies.

The symposium is named in honor of Michael R. Argetsinger (1944-2015), an award-winning motorsports author and longtime member of the Center's Governing Council. Michael's work on motorsports includes:

Walt Hansgen: His Life and the History of Post-war American Road Racing (2006)
Mark Donohue: Technical Excellence at Speed (2009)
Formula One at Watkins Glen: 20 Years of the United States Grand Prix, 1961-1980 (2011)
An American Racer: Bobby Marshman and the Indianapolis 500 (2019)

IMSA’s first races were held at Pocono, where Formula Fords circled a small oval. The concept worked — until it didn’t. Pack racing led to massive accidents, and the organization quickly pivoted.

From there, IMSA began experimenting with:

Formula Vee
Closed‑wheel GT racing
Mixed‑class fields featuring Camaros, Mustangs, Javelins, and Porsche 911s
Small‑bore “RS” cars like Pintos, Gremlins, Fiats, and early Honda Civics

This willingness to adapt became a defining IMSA trait. As Raffauf puts it, the goal was always to create “a product that the little guy private team could win the big races in.”

The Rise of GT Racing and the All‑American GT Concept

By the mid‑1970s, European manufacturers were producing limited‑run customer race cars — Porsche Carreras, BMW CSLs, Ford Capris. American cars, built in vastly larger numbers, couldn’t compete under the same rules.

So Bishop drew a new path forward.

Literally.

Raffauf shows Bishop’s original hand‑drawn artwork for the All‑American GT (AAGT) concept — a rulebook designed to let American iron compete fairly with European machinery. The Chevy Monza, Greenwood Corvettes, and other tube‑frame monsters became IMSA icons.

The Era of Wings, Turbos, and Ground Effects

As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, IMSA entered its wildest period:

Group 5 “wings and things”
Porsche 935 dominance
BMW’s factory CSL and 320i Turbo programs
The birth of GTP prototypes

Raffauf describes the 935 era vividly — cars with huge power, tiny front tires, and “flexible flyer” chassis that demanded absolute precision. Teams innovated aggressively because the rules allowed it: “If it didn’t say you couldn’t, you could.”

But the arrival of the Lola T600 changed everything. With true ground‑effects tunnels, it could simply drive around the old GT cars. It was the first customer‑built GTP car, and it set the template for the next decade.

Street Racing, Stock Cars, and the Expanding IMSA Universe

IMSA wasn’t afraid to take risks — literally. The organization brought racing into downtown Miami, West Palm Beach, San Antonio, Columbus, and New Orleans. Raffauf recalls how the series “messed up the town for a month,” but also brought motorsports to people who’d never seen it before.

Meanwhile, IMSA also experimented with:

American Challenge stock cars
Firestone Firehawk street‑car racing
Skip Barber open‑wheel development series

These programs created opportunities for grassroots racers and future stars alike.

The Audi 90 GTO: A Technical Marvel

One of the most fascinating chapters in Raffauf’s talk centers on the Audi 90 GTO, a full tube‑frame, all‑wheel‑drive monster that defied expectations. Despite IMSA narrowing its tires from 14 inches to 10, the car remained dominant thanks to its ability to distribute power dynamically across all four wheels. Raffauf calls it “one of the coolest, most technically advanced things that IMSA created.”

The GTP Arms Race and Its Consequences

By the late 1980s, GTP cars were exceeding the limits of the tracks themselves. Raffauf recounts violent tire failures at Road Atlanta caused by extreme downforce and 200+ mph speeds over dips the circuits were never designed for. This era produced legendary machines — Nissans, Jaguars, Toyotas, Porsches — but also forced IMSA to rethink safety and sustainability.

Ownership Turbulence and Reinvention

The 1990s brought financial and organizational upheaval. Raffauf describes owners who mismanaged funds, temporary circuits that failed, and the eventual split that led to:

Grand-Am (under NASCAR/ISC)
The American Le Mans Series (under Don Panoz)

Despite the chaos, IMSA continued innovating, exporting its GT concepts to Japan and South America, and helping shape what would become Super GT.

World Sports Cars, Ferrari 333 SP, and the Road to Modern IMSA

With GTP ending, IMSA introduced the World Sports Car formula — open‑cockpit prototypes designed for private teams. The standout was the Ferrari 333 SP, a pure customer car that became one of the most beloved prototypes of the era.

This period also saw:

Daytona Prototypes (DP); and the Birth of DPi
The eventual ALMS/Grand-Am merger
The rise of hybrid racing machinery

By the 2020s, IMSA had become a global powerhouse with 18 OEM partners and some of the most advanced race cars on the planet.

A Legacy Written in People

Mark Raffauf’s keynote isn’t just a recounting of motorsports history — it’s a firsthand account from someone who shaped the rulebook, lived through the politics, and helped guide IMSA through five decades of reinvention. His stories remind us that racing is as much about people and ideas as it is about machines.

Raffauf reflects on working with John and Peg Bishop, the France family, and the countless passionate people who built IMSA’s culture.

Available as a bundle from Octane Press!

One line from his keynote captures his philosophy perfectly: “You can make every mistake you want — once. Second time we’re going to start thinking you’re stupid.” – It’s blunt, funny, and deeply human, much like IMSA’s history itself.

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