How a battle of two US titans will grip IMSA in 2024

Two of the biggest manufacturers in the world are finally turning up at the biggest motor racing party in the world. Ford and Chevrolet, two marques with rich racing pedigrees, are belatedly pitching up in GT3 with factory programmes in the 19th season of the category. Each is arriving with an iconic V8 muscle car: Ford with the Mustang; Chevrolet with the Corvette.

To say they go head to head for the first time on home ground in the IMSA SportsCar Championship’s season-opening Daytona 24 Hours isn’t quite right. That would be to ignore the nine other manufacturers represented in the GT Daytona classes this weekend.

The two American marques have decided at exactly the same time to go up against Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini, BMW et al in a division that has enjoyed boom times for much of its existence for many of the same reasons. Among them is the ability for Ford and Chevrolet to now take on the challenge of the Le Mans 24 Hours by racing in the World Endurance Championship with GT3 machinery in LMGT3. So, too, is the fact that both are going racing to show off their latest products: the seventh-generation Mustang has arrived in the 2024 model year, while the latest Corvette to wear the halo Z06 badge – the mid-engined C8 version – went on sale in 2022.

But there are differences: the Mustang programme is all-new, the Corvette an extension of an existing one that has already extended into the latest era. The GM marque was allowed to race on with its GTE-rules C8.R Corvette in down-specced form in GT Daytona Pro for the past two seasons.

It would be easy to interpret Chevy’s decision to build the Z06 GT3.R as a continuation of Corvette Racing campaigns that stretch all the way back to 1999 and the debut of the C5-R GTS racer at Daytona. (It would pitch up at Le Mans for the first time as part of its maiden full season of racing the following year.) That’s not quite the case.

The Corvette programme, as was, that straddled four generations of the machine, two different classes (GTS/GT1 and GT2/GTE) and five distinct racing cars was a full-on works programme. Corvette Racing, run by the Pratt Miller organisation that has long since dropped the ampersand from the middle of its name, developed the cars and went racing. The sale of machinery to customers was an afterthought, with the exception of the cars raced by the likes of GLPK/Carsport Holland and Phoenix in the FIA GT Championship, and more recently Larbre Competition in the WEC’s GTE Am division.

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt / Motorsport Images

Pratt Miller-run Corvette Racing team will now face off against its customers

Those were factory chassis that were surplus to requirements. But this time it’s different. That explains why Laura Wontrop Klauser, boss of sportscar racing at Chevrolet parent General Motors, says the decision to finally develop a new car for the category, announced in November 2021, “wasn’t taken lightly”.

Chevrolet isn’t just going racing as a factory in the GTD Pro class; it is also building cars for customer teams that will race around the globe. It has to. The requirement to sell 20 cars over the first two seasons of a new GT3 contender was firmed up in the 2020 ruleset. GT3, its architect-in-chief Stephane Ratel has always insisted, is first and foremost a customer racing platform.

Insight: Inside the latest Corvette challenger ready to go global

“We were really excited by the opportunity as the Corvette road car goes more global to have a race programme that complements that,” says Klauser. “Was the time right to go to the customer GT3 platform? The answer was yes.

"When we saw GTE/GTLM would be ending and there would be an opportunity with GT3 to race around the world in so many great series, including as a factory in IMSA and customer racing everywhere else, it made it a very interesting place" Mark Rushbrook

“There was clearly the influence that our core programme in GTE, and GT2 and GT1 before that, was no longer available, but what IMSA did by having the GTD Pro class was really great, so we could keep a presence with a factory-supported team. It was kind of perfect timing where we were with the production car and how close the tie-in is with the Z06 road car. It seemed like the stars aligned.”

Ford offers similar rhetoric. Mark Rushbrook, the company’s motorsport director, says the chance to go racing around the world with the new Mustang presents an “opportunity to tell a very compelling story about our product”. The Ford GT that raced in GTE in the WEC and in GT Le Mans in IMSA – and took class honours at Le Mans in 2016 and then at Daytona in 2017 and 2018 – laid the ground for the car simply called the Mustang GT3 racing this weekend.

“We loved the race programme with the Ford GT from 2016 through 2019,” he says. “At the time with the two separate GT classes it limited what we were able to do. We were always watching for or hoping to see the global convergence of the classes. We were looking for the right opportunity to continue in global sportscar racing.

“When we saw that convergence would be happening, when we saw GTE/GTLM would be ending and there would be an opportunity with GT3 to race around the world in so many great series, including as a factory in IMSA and customer racing everywhere else, it made it a very interesting place. It was very good timing in the sense that we had the all-new seventh- generation Mustang coming out. It all did come together.

“I wouldn’t say it was a no-brainer because there was a lot of hard work to get it approved. But it was approved, and here we are.”

Photo by: Jake Galstad / Motorsport Images

GTD Pro effort run by Multimatic is Ford's first works sportscar involvement since the end of the Ford GT programme

Ford announced its GT3 entry with the Mustang at Daytona two years ago. Little more than a year later came the revelation that it would be returning to Formula 1 in 2026 in conjunction with Red Bull Racing. The Blue Oval has what Rushbrook describes as a “quadrant strategy” when it comes to motorsport, with F1 forming one quarter of that plan.

Its rallying activities in the World Rally Championship with M-Sport and now also at the Dakar Rally, plus a line of electric demonstrators, including SuperVan 4 (which debuted at the 2022 Goodwood Festival of Speed), represent two more. Going racing with the Mustang makes up the final 25%: the world’s best-selling sportscar is not only racing in GT3, but also in GT4 with a new-for-2024 machine, V8 Supercars in Australia and NASCAR, where the manufacturer has swapped to the Mustang sportscar silhouette for 2024.

“Those four different quadrants are very full and very complete,” states Rushbrook. “Does that mean we are not going to add anything in the near future? No, not necessarily. But we are satisfied with that for now.”

Ford Performance Motorsport has again partnered with Canadian-headquartered Multimatic Motorsports for the project. It developed both road and race versions of the Ford GT and ran the car in WEC – that was a Multimatic team running out of workshops near Silverstone, even if the name on the entry was Ford Chip Ganassi Team UK; the ‘real’ Ganassi team ran only the IMSA cars. Now it has been responsible for turning the Mustang into a GT3 car and will run the factory GTD Pro team in IMSA from its facility in Mooresville, North Carolina.

“We have such a great relationship with Multimatic as a company and the individuals involved that goes across a lot of motorsport programmes but also a lot of road programmes,” explains Rushbrook. “Larry [Holt, Multimatic’s motorsport boss] and his team were the first call.”

And the call did go that way: from Ford HQ in Detroit to Multimatic in Toronto. Just like it did with the Ford GT, recalls Holt.

“I was thinking coming up to the 50th anniversary of Ford’s 1966 Le Mans victory that the time was right for them to do something, but it wasn’t actually my idea – they came to me,” says Holt of the project that resulted in the Ford GT after a brief look at what could be done with the Mustang to the GTE rules. “This time it wasn’t me saying we should do a GT3 on the new Mustang, they came knocking on my door again.”

Holt, though, has long had a keen interest in both the GT3 class and going racing with the Mustang: “I’d always wanted to do a GT3 Mustang with Ford.” Multimatic has previously built two versions of the car to GT3 regulations with Ford blessing rather than backing: one, produced out of its FR500C developed for what was then known as the Grand-Am Cup, raced in the FIA GT3 European Championship in 2008; and then a car commissioned by the Belgian Marc VDS squad that took to the track in 2011.

Photo by: Ford

Development Mustang GT3 chassis has been retired after logging over 14,000 miles across the globe

Holt reckons there have been something approaching 10 Multimatic Mustang racers, from a first car that raced domestically in Canada to the GT4 variant that took class honours in last year’s British GT Championship. Slightly nearer the beginning than the middle was a tubeframe GTS-1 racer driven by Beverly Hills, 90210 star Jason Priestley among others in 1996-98.

Work began in earnest on the project ahead of the Daytona 2022 announcement.

“Before that it was a case of doing a feasibility study and asking the question, ‘Can a big car like the Mustang be made to be competitive with a Ferrari with the Balance of Performance?’,” recalls Holt. “Work properly began straight after the announcement; up to then it was really just a concept.”

"I was thinking ‘how am I going to get a WEC entry?’ when Christian [Ried, Proton boss] rang me. I knew that a team that had been in the WEC since the beginning was unlikely to be turned away" Larry Holt

The first car was up and running just over a year later. After a brief shakedown close to base in Mooresville, testing began at Sebring the week after the IMSA/WEC double-header weekend. That first car completed more than 14,500 miles before it was retired at the end of last year.

“That car tested all over the place; it was the car we brought to Europe for customers to try,” says Holt. “It was looking a bit shaggy by the end, but that was the idea. We only changed stuff that broke. We used it to undertake a kind of rolling endurance test, and I can say that we didn’t have any major failures.”

Homologation of the car was completed in November, and the Multimatic team will race chassis #4 and #5 at Daytona. It will be joined on the grid by Proton Competition, the longtime Porsche team with which it forged a link in 2021. It placed Harry Tincknell, who remains under contract with Multimatic after racing as part of the Ford GT and Mazda Daytona Prototype international programmes, at the team and effectively ran the 911 RSR over the remainder of that year’s WEC and the following season. Tincknell stays on board with Multimatic and will race one of the Mustang GT3s in GTD Pro.

Proton will run a car in the regular GTD class for pro-am line-ups in a full IMSA programme alongside its WEC assault with the Mustang. Again Holt said that the idea for Proton to come on board wasn’t down to him.

“I was thinking ‘how am I going to get a WEC entry?’ when Christian [Ried, Proton boss] rang me,” he remembers. “I knew that a team that had been in the WEC since the beginning was unlikely to be turned away.”

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt

Multimatic boss Holt was keen to build a GT3 Mustang and after being approach by Ford, soon secured an entry in the WEC when interest came from Proton

The other confirmed customer going into the 2024 season is the Italian Dinamic Motorsport squad. It has also swapped over from Porsche to fly the Ford flag in the GT World Challenge Europe with a pair of cars, one to be raced in the Pro class and crewed by a roster of factory drivers. Further announcements will follow, but Holt expects that there will be 10 Mustang GT3s racing around the world by the end of this year.

“We’ve got nothing to announce just yet,” says Rushbrook, “but if we had 20 cars sitting here today we could sell every one of them.”

Chevrolet will also be represented in the GTD class in IMSA, with two Z06 GT3.Rs run by Canadian team AWA Motorsport. The marque’s representative in WEC will be the British TF Sport squad, GTE Am champion in 2022. US squad DXDT Racing, meanwhile, will field a solo car in the GTWC America. The GM brand remains “very excited about getting cars into all the series in Europe”, according to Klauser.

“How that will look and which one will come first is still being figured out,” she says. “The next round of announcements will be about 2025, but you might see some more Corvettes catch the tail end of the season.”

What came to be known as the Z06 GT3.R was given a shakedown at GM’s Milford proving ground in October 2022, with testing beginning in earnest at Daytona straight after last year’s 24 Hours. Tommy Milner, who stepped back from a full-time racing role in 2023 to lead development of the GT3, reckons that he alone has completed about 5000 miles in the car.

“It’s been positive for a brand-new car,” reckons Milner. “We haven’t done a start-to-finish 24-hour test, but we have put close to 24 hours on the car without having to change anything. All the little problems we have had have been just that: little.”

But the onerous task for a manufacturer blooding a new car in IMSA is that the season kicks off with the longest race of the season.

“A normal IMSA race of two hours and 45 minutes would be just perfect for your first race, but no it has to be a 24-hour race!” laughs Holt. “I could say that we have done everything we can and are confident, but that would be a newbie thing to claim. I’ve been to Daytona too many times before to say that.”

Elsewhere at Daytona…

Wayne Taylor Racing doubles up

Photo by: Jake Galstad / Motorsport Images

WTR has doubled its chances of victory in IMSA's centrepiece round by adding a second Acura

Wayne Taylor Racing has won the Daytona 24 Hours four times in the past seven years, and on each occasion it did so with a single-car entry. The bad news for the opposition in the GTP class is that it’s now running two. Equally foreboding is the fact that it has linked up with Andretti Global for its expanded full-season assault with Acura’s ARX-06. WTRAndretti, short for Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti, has a new depth of engineering resource behind it, so important in the new era of LMDh hybrids.

The driver line-up is mouthwatering, too. Among its number are a Formula 1 world champion and an Indianapolis 500 winner in Jenson Button and Marcus Ericsson respectively, and three-time Le Mans 24 Hours victor Brendon Hartley. That’s not counting the successes of its full-time drivers: Ricky and Jordan Taylor, Filipe Albuquerque and Louis Deletraz are all sportscar champions at or near the highest level.

Porsche has weight in numbers

Photo by: Jake Galstad / Motorsport Images

Westbrook has switched from works Caddy entry in WEC to join Porsche privateer JDC-Miller

Porsche was represented by the two factory Penske entries when the 963 LMDh made its debut at the start of the new GTP era at Daytona this time last year. Now its bid for a first overall victory at the 24 Hours since 2003 – and a first with a prototype since 1995 (excluding Porsche-powered Rileys!) – is bolstered by a pair of customer cars from Proton Competition and JDC-Miller MotorSports.

That’s significant given that the indies running the German prototype have proved that they can compete at the same level as both arms of Porsche Penske Motorsport. Proton was best Porsche at last year’s Petit Le Mans IMSA curtain-closer at Road Atlanta, while over in the World Endurance Championship Jota led the Stuttgart marque’s charge at the Bahrain finale. Endurance Racing can so often be a numbers game, and Porsche has twice as many cars as each of its rivals.

Resurgent LMP2 contest

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt / Motorsport Images

Following its Le Mans class victory last year, Inter Europol is one of the notable additions to the IMSA LMP2 pack

The LMP2 class may have disappeared from the World Endurance Championship, but it’s booming everywhere else, IMSA included. Those facts are undoubtedly connected. An entry that’s up in quantity and quality in North America now boasts United Autosports among its number: its WEC P2 squad has effectively switched over to the US.

Also joining from the WEC is Inter Europol, class winner at Le Mans last year. Star drivers in what is a fully pro-am class – there must be a bronze-rated driver in the full-season crew and a silver at the enduros – include ex-F1 and Peugeot WEC racer Paul di Resta, and Felix Rosenqvist and Pato O’Ward from IndyCar.

Massa is back

Photo by: Jake Galstad / Motorsport Images

Massa will make his sportscar racing debut in LMP2 with Riley

Felipe Massa, the winner of 11 grands prix, is back racing internationally for the first time since his two-season Formula E career came to an end in 2020; he has plied his trade at home in the Brazilian Stock Car Championship since. The former Sauber, Ferrari and Williams F1 driver is racing in LMP2 aboard a Riley Motorsports ORECA-Gibson 07 thanks to friend and Stock Car sparring partner Felipe Fraga: the Riley regular made the introduction. It will be Massa’s first sportscar race, not counting an outing in the Porsche GT3 Cup in his homeland.

The competitiveness of GTD

The arrival of Ford’s and Chevrolet’s new GT3 racers may be the headline stories in GT Daytona going into the season, but they are just part of an ultra-competitive field made up of machinery from 11 manufacturers in a two-pronged class that’s up in numbers, too. There are 36 cars in total – 13 in Pro and 23 in regular GTD.

Photo by: Art Fleischmann

The pro-am GTD pack boasts a stacked 23-car entry