IMSA president John Doonan says series will unveil 2023 slate at Road America in August.
This weekend, the Lexus Grand Prix of Mid-Ohio at Lexington, Ohio,will have four of the five classes—all the Prototypes, plus the GT Daytona class. There are six DPi cars, six LMP2 cars, and nine LMP3 cars, making for a nice 21-car Prototype field.
All IMSA races don’t feature all five classes, for two reasons: One is the size of the track – Long Beach, for instance, is too short to pack them all in. The other reason is cost containment, figuring that the teams save money by running a truncated schedule.
Some LMP2 and LMP3 drivers would like the run more of the races than they do on the current schedule.
“I’d definitely love to race in more venues,” LMP3 points leader Joao Barbosa, co-driver of the No. 33 Sean Creech Motorsports Liger, told Autoweek. “Seven races is OK, but we could definitely use a couple more races. It would keep things a little more exciting for everybody.”
Barbosa was a multi-time champion in the DPi class before moving to LMP3. In that class, “There is definitely a difference especially on the power and the braking. Cornering speeds seem a little bit low because everything is tuned down a bit, but everything else is very similar to the DPi. It’s a lot of fun to drive.”
Put Ryan Dalziel in the camp hoping for a few more IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship races in 2023.
IMSA
LMP2 points leader Ryan Dalziel is the co-driver of the No. 18 Era Motorsports Oreca—all the LMP2 cars are Orecas, but there is a choice of chassis in the LMP3 class.
Dalziel, who has an overall win in a DPi at the Rolex 24 at Daytona on his resume, has also driven the LMP3 car. “The LMP2 is closer to the DPi. Our car, relatively speaking, is pretty much an Acura without the Acura engine,” Dalziel said. “And that makes for a pretty big difference.”
As far as scheduling goes, put Dalziel down for a lot more races. “I was talking with somebody a couple of days ago about schedules—we used to run I think 14 Grand Am races a year, along with 10 American Le Mans Series races.
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“It’s not as much fun, and harder for drivers to make a good living doing this when you have seven races in a season, especially when you have a wife who is trying to kick you out of the house because you’re home too much.
“I wish we could do more and I know the reason behind it is mostly cost, but everybody on our team are full-time employees so we wouldn’t need to add staff if we added races. It would be nice if we could get back to those double-digits in the future.”
Might that be possible? We won’t know until this summer.
“We are continuing to review class structures in the short and long-term and we will formalize the 2023 class structure and announce it at Road America the first weekend in August,” said John Doonan, IMSA president.
There’s a total of 12 IMSA races on the 2022 schedule.
Of course, everything changes in 2023, with the introduction of the Grand Touring Prototype, or GTP car, which is all-new and will be shared with the WEC, which helps sanction the 24 Hours of Le Mans. This means a team can use the same car to run for the grand trio of endurance races—Le Mans, Daytona and Sebring. The GTP replaces the DPi. But IMSA still needs a full field of cars, and likely LMP2 and LMP3 will have a place on the schedule.
How to Follow IMSA—A Primer
In one of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship events where all five classes are racing, it’s a challenge to explain to a first-timer who is racing who.
The three Prototype classes feature cars that look roughly alike, and in the two GT classes, the cars are exactly the same.
In GT Daytona and GT Daytona Pro, the only difference is the qualifications of the drivers. In GT Daytona, there’s at least one amateur driver per car. In Pro, all the drivers can be professional racers.
It’s a little more complicated in Prototype. The top class is Daytona Prototype international, or DPi, which features the fastest cars and typically an all-professional driver lineup. LMP2 and LMP3 have an amateur element, and are governed by IMSA mechanical rules to go slower than the DPi cars.
That’s because IMSA prefers each class to race within itself geographically on the track, as much as possible. LMP2 cars were almost as fast as DPis at one time, but the cars were governed to go slower. LMP3 cars have always been slower.
The main difference in the three classes is the powertrain. The DPi cars can run any sort of engine they want, but the horsepower is governed to be about the same. This allows manufacturers to run V-8s (Cadillac), V-6s (Acura) and even four-cylinders, which the Mazda Prototype ran until the program ended last season.
The LMP2 cars use a Gibson V-8—Gibson is a British company that makes the engine. In the Europe-based World Endurance Championship, or WEC, the LMP2 class is very popular, because they have no DPi cars.
The LMP3 class uses a modified Nissan V-8. The engine isn’t billed as a Nissan because the company isn’t a paying “partner” of the IMSA series—yet, anyway. LMP3 is slower than the LMP2, but faster than both GT series.
Where to Find IMSA from Mid-Ohio
May 14-15
Qualifying streams live on IMSA.com/TVLive at 1:15 p.m. ET Saturday.
The USA Network has the live broadcast of the two-hour, 40-minute race starting at 2 p.m. Sunday.
Keyword: As IMSA Heads to Mid-Ohio, Some Drivers Already Have Wish List for 2023