How MSR took Acura to the first win of sportscar racing's new era

A new era and new cars, yet the result was the same. Acura and Meyer Shank Racing reprised its 2022 Daytona 24 Hours victory in the first race for the latest breed of LMDh prototypes. And just like 12 months ago, Shank took what on the stopwatch at least looked like a narrow triumph over marque stablemate Wayne Taylor Racing.

But unlike last year’s IMSA series-opener, Shank had the fastest car throughout last weekend’s 24 Hours, not just in the crucial laps as the IMSA SportsCar Championship curtain-raiser drew to an end. The team’s new ARX-06 had a clear edge over Cadillac, the other manufacturer to get through the duration without major technical issues, and also those that didn’t: Porsche and BMW.

Tom Blomqvist took the flag four seconds up the road in the Shank Acura he shared with Colin Braun, Helio Castroneves and Simon Pagenaud, but that margin over WTR driver Filipe Albuquerque revealed little about a race in which the winning car outpaced its rivals in the GTP class all the way.

It was quicker on new tyres or old – double-stinting was the rule rather than the exception this year because of the reduced tyre allocation. It was the fastest car in the nine-car GTP field by a tenth or so over the WTR Acura driven by Albuquerque, Ricky Taylor, Louis Deletraz and Brendon Hartley on both the regular soft high-temperature Michelin that could be used throughout the race, and the low-temp rubber that could only be put on the cars during a 13-hour period in the night. It then had two or three tenths over the Caddys and the Porsches.

But perhaps crucially, Blomqvist and his team-mates could seemingly pass their rivals at will up on the banking of the 3.56-mile Daytona International Speedway. It wasn’t so much that it had an advantage in terms of straightline speed as much as in acceleration. And just for good measure, the Acuras could sometimes eke out their energy allocation for a stint that little bit longer than Cadillac et al.

The #60 MSR Acura qualified on pole by Blomqvist was the strongest car in the race, but did struggle at points

Photo by: Richard Dole / Motorsport Images

Yet for Shank’s domination of this event – it led 365 of 783 laps completed – there was a period of the race, nearly a quarter of it, when the #60 wasn’t nailed to the head of the leaderboard. It even lagged the better part of a minute behind the Chip Ganassi Racing Cadillac V-LMDh shared by Sebastien Bourdais, Renger van der Zande and Scott Dixon, the car that led the second most laps and finished as best of the rest in third. That resulted from an engine issue that afflicted both Acuras and meant that the Shank car made significantly more pitstops than its rivals: it pitted 36 times in comparison to the best-placed Caddy’s 29.

The VP Racing biofuel introduced for 2023 was contaminating the oil, which forced partial and periodic flushes of the lubrication system under yellow flags. Cadillac, it should be noted, had a similar but not so severe problem and just added oil every so often. The root of the issue was the low oil consumption of the ARX-06’s new 2.4-litre direct injection twin-turbo engine.

Honda Performance Development, which masterminds the Acura programme, had worked hard to reduce oil usage, only to discover this problem when it first got its hands on the latest IMSA spec fuel with an 80% bio content in November.

“With bio fuel some of the bits are a bit heavier and want to stick around more in the oil,” explained HPD president David Salters. “If the engine is burning a bit more oil, it kind of balances itself out. Six months ago we really worked quite hard to reduce oil consumption, so it proves that sometimes you’ve got to be careful what you wish for.”

“We just didn’t have the pace; the Acura was too quick all day. We beat my old friend Roger [Penske, who runs the Porsches], but that doesn’t make me feel any better" Chip Ganassi

Shank was able to make up the deficit when normal service for Daytona was resumed with the ninth safety car of the race in hour 20 after a protracted period of green-flag running lasting more than five hours. Pagenaud took a lead at the restart from Bourdais that Shank would never relinquish over the final 97 laps. That was despite a further four yellow-flag periods, the last setting up a 26-minute dash to the finish.

Blomqvist admitted that he was a bit nervous when the WTR Acura came through to second position in the closing stages “because it was the second fastest car today”, but in reality there was little real threat to Shank even with the proliferation of yellows at the end. “My life was made easier because I had such a fantastic car under me,” said Blomqvist, who maintained his 100% winning record at the 24 Hours.

There was another problem for Shank that was a worry for the engineers in the pits if not a handicap for the drivers in the car. The team had noticed that gearbox temperatures were above normal and rising as early as six hours in. The team kept a watching brief on the temps until they hit a dangerous 90 degrees C, at which point the crew just crossed its collective fingers and hoped for the best. After that it was a case of “if it goes, it goes”, reckoned team boss Mike Shank.

Rising gearbox temperatures gave MSR a fright

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt / Motorsport Images

The WTR Acura, now entered in conjunction with Andretti Autosport, might have had something for the race winners. The team had a trimmed out rear aerodynamic section ready to go onto the car for the final hours of the race. But when it tried to get it onto the car, it found the mountings on the higher-downforce version had broken.

“We got the original tail section off, but a couple of the dowels had broken off and were stuck in the rear deck,” explained team boss Wayne Taylor. “It wasn’t a problem to put the old one back, but it meant we couldn’t get the new one on.”

The WTR Acura had dropped back in the night as a result of the oil issue. A bracket on the oil filler broke and repairs back in the garage dropped it briefly as much as three laps off the lead. The long period of green running meant it wasn’t until late in the penultimate hour that WTR could get back on terms by exploiting the wave-around rules to claw back the lost laps.

Cadillac admitted that this wasn’t really its race to win after filling out positions three to five with its trio of V-LMDhs. “We just didn’t have the pace; the Acura was too quick all day,” said team boss Chip Ganassi. “We beat my old friend Roger [Penske, who runs the Porsches], but that doesn’t make me feel any better.”

The Bourdais entry, Ganassi’s full-season IMSA entry under the Cadillac Racing banner, was the quicker of its two cars and took the final podium spot five seconds behind WTR. It had a clean race save for one change of rear bodywork after a hit from behind and one steering wheel replacement. The sister car, which will now swap to the World Endurance Championship, took fourth in the hands of Earl Bamber, Alex Lynn and Richard Westbrook a further second and a half adrift.

The Action Express Racing Caddy ended up 12 laps down in fifth in the hands of Pipo Derani, Alexander Sims and Jack Aitken. It dropped out of contention in the 15th hour after a clash with a GT Daytona car that damaged the rear suspension, the team changing the complete rear end with the loss of half an hour.

BMW was the third LMDh manufacturer home, getting one of its M Hybrid V8s in front of the best of the Porsche 963s. Philipp Eng, Augusto Farfus, Marco Wittmann and Colton Herta claimed sixth, 19 laps ahead of the only one of the two 963s to make the finish.

The Ganassi-run Cadillacs didn't have the ultimate pace to challenge Acura in the final throes of the race

Photo by: Jake Galstad / Motorsport Images

Felipe Nasr, Matt Campbell and Michael Christensen were seventh in class and 14th overall behind seven LMP2 entries. The big delay for the Porsche Penske Motorsport entry that Nasr had put on the outside of the front row came as early as the sixth hour when the high-voltage battery supplied by Williams Advanced Engineering required changing.

The problem encountered by the first of the LMDh manufacturers to get its car up and running was a new one for the team. It was related to “safety systems and protocols”, explained team boss Jonathan Diuguid. A subsequent delay for this car was related to old tech rather than the hybrid system. A water leak lost it more time with a series of stops after the sun had come up, including one of 29 minutes in hour 19.

The second Porsche, shared by Nick Tandy, Mathieu Jaminet and Dane Cameron, didn’t see the chequered flag. A gearbox issue in the 22nd hour – the team reported a significant sized hole in the casing – resulted in the car being pushed back to its garage for repairs.

The intent was to get back out on track until, said Diuguid, “we found some other problems”. It wouldn’t have made any difference to the car’s points haul: it was going to be classified eighth in GTP ahead of the second of the Bimmers come what may.

"We don’t know why we had that pace all of a sudden; we picked up pace from the previous stint that I ran" Nick Tandy

It wasn’t a good day for Porsche, admitted programme head Urs Kuratle: “A disappointing race, not the result we were looking for. We had a lot of problems, but almost everything was new, something we hadn’t encountered before. Hopefully we’ve had all our problems now in one race.”

Yet there was a brief moment when the Tandy car looked like it might have a sniff of a podium despite dropping three laps down during the night. Kuratle, it should be said, was pretty sure that the car was on for a top three. The deficit followed an off for Tandy on 16 hours when an LMP3 car turned in on him at the flat-out kink between the two infield hairpins. On three-stint-old tyres he “bailed out of the corner”, went across the grass and hit a polystyrene advertising hoarding.

“What I didn’t realise was that those things are weighted down with sandbags”, he said in explanation of the #6 Porsche sustaining significant damage to both the front splitter and the rear diffuser. Three laps were lost to repairs and the protracted period of green-flag running offered no chance to get them back.

Porsche had a disappointing return to prototype racing with its new 963, but looked like it had a podium shot at one stage

Photo by: Art Fleischmann

But the quickfire succession of safety cars late on Sunday morning gave Porsche hope of salvaging something from this race. Tandy moved to only one complete lap down after yellow number nine in hour 21, when he was able to pass race leader Pagenaud and pull away, but pretty quickly he was in trouble. Twice he overshot Turn 1 and came to halt, and then stopped again out on track before bringing the car back on electrical power.

“We don’t know why we had that pace all of a sudden; we picked up pace from the previous stint that I ran,” explained Tandy. “All we did was change tyres. Maybe we just got the tyre into a nice temperature window and it started to work for us.”

The problem for Shank’s rivals at Daytona last weekend was that the winning Acura worked all race long.

For the second year in a row, MSR got to adopt Castroneves's signature fence-climbing celebration at Daytona

Photo by: Richard Dole / Motorsport Images