Crunch time for a motorsport underachiever

Mazda is the big underachiever in the IMSA SportsCar Championship prototype ranks. It's still seeking an elusive first outright victory, something that legendary sportscar team Joest Racing couldn't put right in 2018.

That explains a second major revamp of the long-running programme in two years ahead of the 2019 season, which kicks off this weekend with the Rolex-sponsored Daytona 24 Hours - where Mazda secured pole on Thursday.

The arrival of Joest, a 16-time winner of the Le Mans 24 Hours and Audi's long-time partner at the French classic, in place of the US SpeedSource team gave Mazda nowhere to hide. Yet last season it still failed to chalk up a first victory in five years of trying (though admittedly not very hard with its turbodiesel Lolas in 2014-15).

There were near-misses along the way, most notably at Laguna Seca in September when race leader Harry Tincknell spun after being squeezed onto the kerb while lapping an LMP2 car.

But another winless season in the second year of the RT24-P Daytona Prototype international resulted in some deep soul-searching, according to the architect of the programme, Mazda America motorsport boss John Doonan.

"We also sat down with all our partners and asked ourselves some hard questions about our personnel and processes after the 2018 season," he says. "We looked at what we could do better and how we could do it better."

The result is a new team structure at Mazda Team Joest.

Multimatic Motorsport, which developed the RT24-P out of the LMP2 machine it built in conjunction with Riley Technologies, is stepping up its involvement in the programme. That includes taking over responsibility for the engineering of the two Mazdas at each IMSA round.

It has reunited Joest and Leena Gade, who engineered three of Audi's final four Le Mans victories. She takes charge of the #77 entry shared by series regulars Olivier Jarvis and Tristan Nunez, and Timo Bernhard and Rene Rast, and is described by Doonan as "a terrific asset to the team with a massive amount of experience".

"We weren't afraid to show our performance and push the envelope. Some of the opposition chose to come with us, and some didn't" Harry Tincknell

The Joest team, which runs the Mazda programme out of premises near Road Atlanta in Georgia, has been overhauled as well.

Long-time team boss Ralf Juttner, formerly technical director and then managing director, is no longer involved in the project, while race engineer Jan Lange has stepped up to take charge of the programme. Chris Mower, a veteran of IndyCar campaigns with KV Racing Technology and Panther Racing and team manager on Nissan's 2015 LMP1 campaign at Le Mans, has come in as team coordinator.

Mazda has taken a no-stone-unturned approach as it tries to end its winless streak, says Doonan.

"We've looked at the whole package from the top down; it's definitely been a busy winter," he explains. "We refined our package and then went out and did a significant amount of testing.

"The bottom line is that we wanted to put every bit of mileage on the car to make sure we are ready for Daytona and the rest of the season."

Doonan won't put a figure on that mileage and only says that Mazda did "thousands of miles". But it's known that it undertook two endurance tests as part of its winter schedule.

Mazda has also been given a helping hand by IMSA as the DPis were stepped up in performance after being hived off from the LMP2s into a standalone class at the front of the field.

The marque has the smallest capacity engine on the grid in the two-litre turbo developed by Advanced Engine Research (AER) in the UK and, Doonan points out, had probably the least efficient aero package of all the DPis on the grid.

"The design we have is very Mazda and very branded, which is exactly aligned with the intentions of the DPi formula, but meant it wasn't the most efficient," explains Doonan.

"We weren't the most competitive in a straight line last year, so IMSA invited us back to the windtunnel to look at options to make the car a little bit more efficient."

The Mazda MZ-2.0T powerplant has also been allowed new internals in a couple of key - though unspecified - areas and a higher rev limit for the new season. Doonan says this is aimed at increasing performance while maintaining reliability: "That might sound counterintuitive, but allowing the engine to rev higher is helping it not to work so hard."

The new Mazda package jumped to the top of the tree even before underlining its pace with the Daytona pole.

At the official pre-race test known as the 'Roar' at the beginning of January, the two RT24-Ps blocked out positions one and two in the qualifying session used to determine the pit allocation for the race.

Mazda insists that it put everything on the line at the Roar, though it isn't entirely convinced that rivals Cadillac, Acura and Nissan opted to do the same.

"Our sole purpose in 2019 is to win races and the championship. I'd be lying if I didn't say that we want to win really bad" John Doonan

"We weren't afraid to show our performance and push the envelope," says Tincknell, who shares the #55 this weekend with Jonathan Bomarito, his full-season team-mate, and Olivier Pla. "Some of the opposition chose to come with us, and some didn't.

"It wasn't a surprise that we ended up fastest, because I know the hard work that has been put into the project by everyone involved over the past few months."

Tincknell believes the RT24-P is now a much more raceable machine than in 2018.

"Last year, other DPis would pull away from us down the straights even when we were in the tow," he explains. "That doesn't appear to be the case now."

The switch from Continental to Michelin tyres could also play a role in Mazda's quest to finally become an IMSA winner.

"The car is much more reactive to set-up changes with this tyre," says Tincknell. "I know it helps us, but what I can't say is whether it's helping everyone else at the same time."

Tincknell is hopeful that everything is now in place for Mazda to break its IMSA duck.

"We could have won races last year - there were four where we had a real chance - but we didn't manage to get that elusive first victory, so I'd have to say we did underachieve," he says.

"We've taken big steps forward in a lot of areas for this season and there's no doubt that we're going to Daytona with our best ever shot of winning overall."

Mazda surely now has no excuses for failure in its efforts to finally get an IMSA win on the board and score its first international sportscar victory since its famous 1991 triumph at Le Mans with the 787B Group C car.

But Doonan insists that Mazda is not in a "must-win situation" this season.

"That is not at all how Mazda operates," he says. "But our sole purpose in going on track in 2019 is to win races and the championship. I'd be lying if I didn't say that we want to win really bad."