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IMSA: 55 years of Motorsports Influence and History (Mark Raffauf) · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

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Break Fix's History of Motorsports Series is brought to you in part
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by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the
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Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of
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Commerce and the Arge Singer family.
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On this episode of the Logbook, we opened with a figure whose
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career doesn't just intersect with American sports car racing history.
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He's documented it.
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Mark Raffauf has spent more than five decades inside the heartbeat of
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the International Motor Sports Association, better known to us as imsa.
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Shaping its rule book, guiding its evolution and preserving its
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stories with the clarity of someone who lived every chapter from the
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inside, from his earliest days.
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Working alongside John Bishop, IMSA's, founder and former SECA President and
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a driving force behind the I-M-R-R-C at Watkins Glen Mark witnessed the
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organization's rise from a bold idea to one of the most influential
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forces in global motor sport.
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His path through technical leadership, car regulation, development, and
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event operations, places him among the few who truly understand how the
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sport grew, fractured, reinvented itself and ultimately thrived.
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In his Gene S Ainger keynote address, mark weaves together vivid anecdotes
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and precise historical detail tracing both his own colorful career and the
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remarkable 60 year arc of IMSA racing.
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It's a story of innovation, resilience, and personalities told by someone
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who helped write the rule book and later wrote the history itself.
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Mark is now IMSA's senior director of competition and
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co-author with Mitch Bishop of two definitive volumes on the series.
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IMSA 1969 to 1989, the inside story of how John Bishop built the world's
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greatest sports car racing series and imsa, 1990 to 99, the turbulent
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years of American sports car racing.
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Together, they formed the written counterpart to the perspective
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he brings on the stage tonight.
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So without further ado, here is Mark Raffauf giving us a guided tour
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through 60 years of IMSA's influence, evolution, and enduring legacy.
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So please welcome Mark Raffauf.
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Thank you.
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So I'm gonna try and give you 56 years of history in about 45 minutes.
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It's all visual.
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You don't have to read anything other than that logo.
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Which I was inspired last night at the theater watching the film about Cameron
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and Gene Ainger starting the racing here, and wanted to say that John and
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Peg Bishop, who are given the credit for founding IMSA with help from people like
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Cameron and Gene Bill France at nascar.
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They're from Cortland, jc, and Duke's father was the one that convinced John
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Bishop to become the executive director of the SCCA in the sixties, which
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under his oversight created the Canam.
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TransAm and Formula 5,000.
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The schism that was brought up earlier or in that film about pro
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racing drivers versus amateur racing drivers, and the attitude of the SCCA
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at that time is what had John resign.
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And shortly after that, he got a call from Bill France in Daytona.
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Bill, John Cameron all knew each other from Sebring, 24 hours of Daytona, SCCA,
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sort of sanctioning other major events.
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And I wanted to start with that because kind of it all started right here
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along with a lot of other things.
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And what I'm gonna try and talk about is the people, not just the individuals,
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but they had groups of people they surrounded themselves with really
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smart people, really enthusiastic, and a passionate people for five decades
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through various ownerships and so on.
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So I start with this.
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This is actually resides in the I-M-R-R-C.
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It is John Bishop's original artwork of the logo of IMSA from day one.
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It has a little water spot on the eye up there, so he was a little
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sloppy with his watercolors.
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Anyway, it all started with a phone call between these two guys, both France
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on the right, John Bishop on the left.
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They're sitting outside the turn four tunnel at Daytona.
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Bill called him up and said, we need to do a road racing program with a
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NASCAR business mindset behind it.
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Away they went.
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So what was first Pocono International Raceway?
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This is actually the cover of the program of the very first IMSA race at Pocono,
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which is on the little, I think it's an eighth mile oval on the Tri Oval area.
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And, uh, I don't know that John designed it, but I bet he
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had something to do with it.
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So we started with Formula Fords.
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Initially there were small ovals that worked out pretty good.
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So Bill Fran said, well, let's go to Talladega in
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Daytona with 50 formula Fords.
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That didn't necessarily work as well because they ran around in
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big packs and had huge accidents.
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So we said, okay, we're not doing that anymore.
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The same time they started a Formula V program.
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So IMSA's legacy and throughout its careers of five decades
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always had open wheel elements.
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John and the little staff at the time tried that.
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It was great racing until they crashed into each other, which all you needed
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was one guy to sneeze in the middle of the pack, and you had a 20 car pile up.
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So we decided that wasn't a good idea.
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You could see how it sort of generates into pack racing with these guys.
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Great stuff, but kind of scary.
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So what was the next idea?
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We need closed wheel cars.
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John decided he would take his background in TransAm.
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We'll take those Camaros Mustangs Javelins.
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We'll mix it up with F-I-A-G-T cars.
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Porsche nine elevens in this case.
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That's I think Peter, Greg being chased by Juan Montalvo and a
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two liter escort from Europe.
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These were little GT cars and we mixed 'em up with the big GT cars.
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And next thing you know, in 1972, there was the Camel gt, which RJ Reynolds
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Tobacco came in, recognized it as a good product and away that went.
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The other thing we did was we created a series for what
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was then the new little cars.
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So in this you got a Fiat, a Gremlin, a Mazda, a Pinto, and I
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think that's a Volvo in the back.
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But John was astute enough and IMSA was a student enough to realize
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all these manufacturers had no place to race their new product.
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So we created this and that's when little cars, but I think the
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first Honda to ever race in the United States was a civic and imsa.
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Most of these brands, BMW and others just grew from this
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into gt cars and bigger cars.
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The American manufacturers, we had the Pinto, the Gremlin,
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and other similar cars.
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And what was great about this, they were running on street tires.
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They took BFGs initially, good years, shaved them down to three 30
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seconds so they wouldn't fall apart.
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And you could run around Daytona as an example.
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Tom Wall, in about 1975, did a closed course record at Talladega
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at over 150 miles an hour.
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And an A MC Hornet on street tires.
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Street tires on race cars, not new, but running a whole series
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on 'em was a relatively new idea.
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So this grew great.
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It also provided the cars that could fill the back of the GT fields as
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that grew in 72 and 73, raced in the daytime, raced at night, and
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then we got into the mid seventies.
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By that point, people like Porsche, BMW Ford with their Capris.
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Most of the European manufacturers would build a limited run of customer race
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cars, Porsche Carreras or whatever.
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Back then, I think Porsche made about 5,009 elevens a year.
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I think GM made about 300,000 Camaros.
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So to equate a Camaro with a Porsche was a technical.
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Problem.
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So John, and this is his original artwork, decided to apply what the FIA applied
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to the European cars, to American cars.
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And he created more or less by himself all American gt.
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This happens to be a Vega, which was replaced rapidly by the Chevy Mazda.
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And that became the mainstay, along with John Greenwood's, big Corvettes
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to compete against the European brands.
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And that's really where IMSA's growth started in production
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car racing, which was GT cars.
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So that was the first A A GT car, which of course is a Vega.
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Looks a little bit like the drawing, but that didn't last long.
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And as back to more RS cars, this is a typical RS race at Daytona.
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In this same timeframe, car and driver Pinto is up there.
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Nick crawl, president of the SECA in the BMW in second, George
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Alderman who drove in the first formula forward race at Pocono is
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in the lead in turn one in the wet.
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Lebanza Al Holbert doing an engine change during the 24 hour race, a
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planned engine change, which wasn't really the best way to go about a 24
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hour race, but they did it anyway.
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We did Formula Atlantic.
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We co sanctioned the Formula Atlantic Series in the era of Vinu and Ray
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Hall and Elliot Forbes Robinson.
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The Canadians did the Canadian races.
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IMSA did the US races.
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1976. This is I think, the ski rule car that's Vinu in the back.
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So this is 1976 Road Atlanta.
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Those of you who know the track will be stunned at what the place
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looked like in 1976, but you see Camaros, Porsches, la Manza.
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This was the Manza that first all around A A GT victory, Al Holbert in the car.
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There's four or five of these little two minute clips of video.
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And this wasn't video.
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This was film because video hadn't been invented yet.
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And just to show you what the tracks were like, what the cars looked like, and not
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just still pictures, but this car was the first mass produced tube frame race
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car before nascar, before anybody else.
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14 of those were built.
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By Decon and three or four other constructors built cars to the same rules,
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but they had six liter Chevys in the front of a Chevy Mazda in a tube frame chassis.
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But the car captured the look of the road car just as the CSL and
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the Corvette, which was the intent.
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Marketing wise.
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The cars had to look like what they were supposed to look like.
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But you can see here the front straightaway at Atlanta, there's no
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pit lane on the right as there is now.
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There actually was a stream over there where people would be periodically pulled
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out of the water and there we have it on.
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Al Holbert winning the first All American GT overall victory
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at Road Atlanta in 1976.
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Those were the two main antagonists.
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That's Michael Kaiser on the right with Milt Minner a lot of times, and
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Al Holbert who used Doc Bundy, a whole bunch of other drivers, but I didn't
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want to talk too much about that, but beautiful car people remember them
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today and still go, you know what?
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For something from the mid seventies, it's still kind of a
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current looking piece of hardware.
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That was the antagonist for everybody, which is the Porsche, RSR.
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This is Mike Kaiser before he got the Mazda.
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But this car was sold in 1974.
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Brand new three liter Porsche, RSR was $23,000.
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Of course there's inflation, but it still was a pretty good deal.
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The other great car, the air was the C-S-L-B-M-W.
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This came about.
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In 1975, the factory decided IMSA in the US was the place to race.
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So they gave up their touring car program in Europe and brought the whole mess.
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Ronnie Peterson, Brian Redmond, Zi, Alan Moffitt, they brought
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the whole factory deal over here.
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They came to Daytona, didn't do too well.
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Moved into Bobby Allison shops in Hueytown, Alabama, and converted the
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cars from European touring cars to NASCAR stock cars with triple door bars
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and stiffened them all up, and then became the cars to beat because of that.
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That's a typical, let's turn one at at Laguna in that same era, but Monza,
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Monza, BMW, Carl Schaeffer's, big Block.
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Camaro.
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Porsche.
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Porsche, Porsche, Porsche, Porsche, Charlie, Kemp's, Mustang, at
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the very top on the right, which was also an All American GT car.
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And then we decided we'd go stock car racing.
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So we invented American Challenge.
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This is Gene Felton in a Buick Skylark.
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We didn't know what we were gonna do with them, but we basically created a
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class, and I want to emphasize all of this stuff you see here, John Bishop
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and the staff at the time, we'd sit around and say, what do we need?
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To have for our product.
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Our product is entertainment.
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We're not here to set the world on fire.
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We're here to entertain people.
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Go to places like Road Atlanta and Road America and have people come and watch.
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This is all before television as well.
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So we created this, we ran 'em with our GT cars for a couple years, and then
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Kelly came along and we ran 10 years of.
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Of American stock cars, which NASCAR tried to do at the same time.
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Didn't court work out as well as ours did, but road racing stock cars was a new idea.
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Again, sat around one day and decided what do we need to do?
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We need something like that.
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We need these kind of cars to be on the racetrack in some way.
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Again, this is Riverside BMW's, out front Ford Capri behind Gaggle of Porsche's.
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Great shot of Bert's car.
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Beautiful cars, beautifully turned out.
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And then we got into group five.
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So now you see the beginning of the big wings and things, and the
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extended front splitters car in the back is Chris Cord's Mazda.
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The car in the front is David Hobbes and the McLaren BMW three 20.
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I turbo.
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Also a factory deal, but run out of McLaren in, in Detroit.
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Group five came along, and again, it was the same situation.
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The OE in Europe made nine 30 fives, a few of these BMWs, and
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then they became the dominant cars.
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John Bishop always wanted a product that the little guy private
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team could win the big races in.
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So Daytona Sebring, there had to be something that you were not
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dependent on a car company to have to have a car because after a year
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or two, those guys quit making 'em.
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So every generational shift technically in IMSA GT racing has been due to
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coming up with something new that would take the place of OE Manufacture built
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purpose race cars, and have it available to anybody who wanted to buy it.
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And that was an underlying theme for five decades.
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That's the other big monsters, the big Greenwood Corvettes.
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This particular car at Daytona in 1974 did 212 miles an hour.
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It pit in at Daytona.
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It's the size of a small house that has a 494 cubic inch
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cross ram Can-Am engine in it.
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It's got tires on the back big enough for a semi, but it was fast.
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How did that work against the Porsches?
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Technically everybody got 32 gallons of gas.
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So 250 miles at Daytona.
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This car was two to three seconds, a lap faster than most of the other cars,
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but had to make two more pit stops to get the fuel and what happened In the
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end, they converged, and the racing was really quite excellent because of that.
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Another great shot at BMW at Sebring in the old days where you
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could see between the car and the big airplanes, there's nothing.
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But that's the way it was.
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Gives you an idea.
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That's the winning car from 1975.
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But yeah, these constellations, DC sixes, DC sevens lined up there, they're
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basically cutting them up for scrap, but there's a little vestige of a snow
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fence there in front of the windscreen.
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But there's nothing between parked airplanes and the race cars.
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There's a shot from Daytona same year where.
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There's actually trees there, which of course have been long chopped up by
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spectators for firewood or whatever, but there's no more trees in Daytona.
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Another good shot of Chris k Manza, mid Ohio.
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Again, beautiful cars.
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This is now 1978 and this is a pretty important year technically.
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Two front row cars are factory 9 35 Porsches.
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One's a customer car, which is Kramer, and the other one is the martini factory car.
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Behind them are the two in all Terra GTP cars.
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GTP came about through a collaboration with the A CO and the Lamar people to
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develop a prototype car that a number of private constructors could build and
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powered by engines that anybody could buy.
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So those two cars are powered by Cosworth, three Liter Cosworth,
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kind of a dune Formula one engine.
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They actually did pretty well, but a lot of people don't understand that
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that was a collaboration with the A CO. It then led to bigger political
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issues in a few years with the FIA.
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But we'll get to that.
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So every time we came out with new cars, Daytona's the first
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race, it's the Super Bowl race.
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At no time did any new car.
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Beat the old cars at Daytona when they first came out until the
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DPI cars in the mid 20 teens.
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The car that won is a little 43 Hurley Haywood up there in the
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upper right Porsche Carre, RSR.
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It's been in the game since 1974.
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It's been four years and it's still a competitive, big race winning car.
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All this other stuff broke or crashed.
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So that's part of it.
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Again, another shot showing you.
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The first prototype of the turbo car is the Zero zero Car, which Interscope
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had, which was driven by Dan and Guy is Factory car, Kramer car, one of the GTP.
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In Alters.
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We talked about consequential racetracks, a couple shots from Lime Rock.
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This is before the Chica.
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When you have 850 horsepower going up a hill.
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Wish was, I hate to say, kind of normal.
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There's even a more dramatic one.
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These cars were, uh.
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Absolutely terrible to drive.
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You had to really be on your game.
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Very difficult to drive huge amount of power based on a standard nine 11 shell,
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kind of a flexible flyer until they got here and everybody stiffened them up.
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Huge rear tires, tiny, small front tires.
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Aerodynamically, eh, not that good either.
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In those days you could run a twin turbo set up, or a single
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turbo set up with two different specifications of weight because of lag.
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No electronics existed yet to control turbo lag.
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So two small turbos.
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Worked a little better, but the big one made more power.
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So this is a rare photograph of Peter Greg's two cars, that road Atlanta,
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trying to decide which one he would race.
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One's a single, one's a double.
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Then they morphed into, this is JLP three.
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They began to get Kramer body work, body work design in California.
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And I would say by 19 79 80, we'd have 15,930 fives on the grid.
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One BMW, one or two Ford Mustang Z speed cars.
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But of the 15,930 fives, no, two of 'em the same.
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Every team got the cars hot, rotted 'em, changed them.
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The rules then philosophically were, if it didn't say you couldn't, you could,
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they had dry ice in the inner coolers.
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They had fon sprays in the intercos for qualifying, and everybody said they
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were cheating and we're going, well, no, it doesn't say you can't do that.
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So they're just being a little more innovative than you are.
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Try it, see if it works for you.
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So it generated a lot of diversity.
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Hot rods.
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This is, uh, lagoon Deka.
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It's Ray Hall on the Nine and Fitzpatrick.
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Whittington Brothers Ford, Zach.
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Speed Mustang pretty evenly matched in speed.
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Down the back straightaway at Daytona.
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Little lock up there.
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Yo.
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But you could see Porsche, Porsche, Porsche, Porsche,
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Porsche, Porsche, Porsche, Porsche, Paul Newman, and a Nissan Ford.
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Somebody crashing the end all car.
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But again, we got to another point where if you didn't have a Porsche
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9 35, which you could no longer get, you had to build one out of a wreck
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street car or something like that.
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And that's what they did.
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But we got to the point where it was all the same car with one or two exceptions.
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So we needed this GTP concept to generate.
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Something new, and that was the Lola T 600.
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Also, the first customer, GTP car built about 15 of those.
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That's J, that's the ultimate form of the the 9 35, which by then in 82,
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83 was running full ground effects.
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Still a rear engine car, but the only thing left that was a nine 11 would be the
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front windshield cow, and side windows.
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The rest of it, as you can see, is heavily different from a nine 11.
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Again, all allowed.
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Shot from Daytona.
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These cars were great.
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They had mechanical waste gates.
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They made all kinds of weird noises.
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Spectators love them.
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They burned a lot of excess fuel through the turbo, so every time you got off the
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engine, you got a big flame out the back.
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So it was kind of spectacular to watch these cars and hear them.
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They were not just a visual thing, they were a great sensory
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overload in every regard.
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RS cars.
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They're still around, running around on street tires.
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Now you see Dotson's Gremlins still Gremlins Mazda in the back, BMW 2002.
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This series created an entire industry of people that IMSA tried to establish
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early on who then made their entire lives their business in racing.
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Roger Mandeville with Mazda's, Amos Johnson, a number of people built
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their entire life and business.
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Starting with these cars, we always had a place or always wanted a place.
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And this series in particular, along later with the Firestone
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Fire Hawk series, provided a place for the average guy to go racing.
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You didn't have to be elite, you didn't have to have a lot of money, but you
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could go out, you could have a great time.
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And I wanna say up till this point, one of the things IMSA did
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was we paid everybody something.
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You might have won 50 bucks back then.
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50 bucks was two nights in a hotel room, so you could go to
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registration on Sunday afternoon and get paid in cash to get home.
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But we did that for a decade.
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It was a completely novel thought process that you would actually get
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paid to do this even if you were last.
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But that was the philosophy.
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We paid everybody and it was appreciated.
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You also got an apple at registration.
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When you went to get your credentials.
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You got Peggy Bishop would give you an apple.
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So that was kind of cool too.
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So this is a typical RS race at Daytona.
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Mob racing.
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The only thing that made it better than Formula Fours is they had fenders
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and the wheels didn't come off.
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So there was a lot, a lot of stuff about that, but there's probably 10
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different kinds of cars in that picture.
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But that was what it was all about.
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You know, little guys racing who then became big guys later on,
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and that was really important to us to make that possible.
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Road America First Race.
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Road America 500 took us a while to crack the Cliff Tufty wall as well.
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But finally they realized that if they wanted to do this,
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they had to have a bigger race than what they had at the time.
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But this is the Road America 501st year.
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See the crowd's great.
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The little BMW won that race 500 miles.
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It's the longest it ever ran and its entire career, which is pretty good.
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The pit lane, no speed limit.
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A lot of brave people in my opinion, but that's what it looks like.
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That's Fitzpatrick, leaving him from a fuel stop.
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But that's the old pagoda, which when, uh, Lee Hall, who was the president at
20:19
the time, said they were gonna take it down, I volunteered to fly to Wisconsin
20:22
so that I could light the fire on one end that would burn it to the ground, which
20:26
was the easiest way to get rid of it.
20:28
Mazdas were huge technical innovations with rotary engines.
20:31
They provided a 330 horsepower car for virtually nothing in money
20:35
compared to piston engines, and we had lots of 'em that's cant racing.
20:39
Uh, Lee Mueller, Kathy Rud, another weird great car, the R
20:42
five Turbo by Patrick, Chuck Mart.
20:44
Unfortunately, he.
20:45
Was killed in it at Midio testing, but this was one of the other interesting
20:50
cars that Im SA fostered sometimes writing special rules for special
20:55
manufacturers to enable them to be there.
20:57
The Zak speed Mustangs, again, blowing a lot of unused gas out the exhaust pipe.
21:01
Klaus Ludwig, Ray Hall, Kevin Cogan, great Cars, two liter turbos.
21:06
It's gotten kind of complicated at this point.
21:08
Some of the other fun things that happened.
21:10
This is testing Fitzpatrick's nine 30 5K three the week before
21:14
Lama on the highway in German.
21:16
So the crews would go over and build up these cars at Kramer and
21:19
then take 'em right to Lama, but you had to run 'em a little bit.
21:22
So took it out on the Audubon, gave it a little stroll down the highway, right?
21:25
With a Volkswagen next to it.
21:27
So if you read the sign, let's see, Doman, yeah, calm, they
21:29
were, weren't calm, basically.
21:31
A lot of that stuff went on all the time.
21:33
Sometimes here, but in Europe it was routine to get a cake
21:36
plate, which is a Kramer plate.
21:37
It was a dealer plate, but they just stuck it on the race car
21:40
and took it out on the highway.
21:41
So at this point, 82, we have three series.
21:44
We have Camel GT Champion, spark Plug was the RS Cars.
21:47
We had a 15 year relationship with that company.
21:49
12 years with Kelly Kelly Services with the Kelly American Challenge.
21:53
And at this point we started working with Skip Barber on this Barber Sob
21:56
series Open Wheel Cars, which generated people like Diego Montoya, Juan Montoya,
22:01
Brian hurt a lot of IndyCar people.
22:03
Paul Tracy ran in Skip Barber's beginning Pro series, but that was just
22:08
starting and we were just contemplating another shot of Road America.
22:11
Crowds were starting to get quite large at this time.
22:14
Late eighties, early nineties.
22:16
The 9 35 kept morphing into more bizarre high speed.
22:19
This is a Moby Dick version actually.
22:21
It's the end dial car done in Preston Hens colors at Road America, which you could
22:25
see it's quite a long way from a nine 11.
22:27
It's flatter, wider.
22:29
And then came this piece.
22:30
This is the Lola T 600, which was the first production series built GTP car.
22:35
Eric broadly told Brian Redmond, I need two orders.
22:39
These cars cost $75,000 in 1981.
22:43
Get me two orders and we'll build them.
22:44
And they ended up building about 15 of them.
22:46
This was run by Garson Enterprises who had run Porsches and basically Brian
22:50
Redmond won the first race as a true ground effects car with tunnels, which
22:55
was fairly new concept at that time.
22:58
How differently the car could use the racetrack over a conventional car.
23:02
The downforce and aerodynamic development, two biggest changes in
23:07
this kind of racing in 40 years are tire development and aero development.
23:11
The engines made 800 horsepower 45 years ago that no big deal.
23:14
Cheaper to make that power these days.
23:16
But arrow and tires is what move these kind of cars.
23:20
And in some cases you'll see outside the boundaries of what
23:23
the race tracks could handle.
23:24
John and Bill France always had a theory that the car needed to be bigger than the
23:29
track, and that worked until something.
23:31
Bad happened and then you had to kinda rethink that philosophy.
23:34
So by the late eighties, these kind of cars had morphed into going to every
23:39
racetrack We went, for instance here before the bus stop, the end of the back
23:43
strait away was about 210 Laguna Seca before they made the inner loop turned
23:48
two up the hill at the bridge, 205.
23:51
Mid Ohio, two 10.
23:52
Every track we went to the cars were faster than Indy cars, and at
23:55
the tracks we shared, like at Road America and Portland Cars actually
23:58
did faster lap times in an Indy car.
24:00
We were pushing that envelope by the late eighties.
24:03
But again, some views very simple.
24:04
This is kind of, those are familiar with Lola's.
24:06
It's kind of like a Lola T 70 from the sixties tub with
24:11
a six liter Chevy V eight.
24:12
This is a Franz Lease Chaparral engine car.
24:15
75 grand.
24:16
The engines were like 35, 40 grand.
24:18
So Porsche 9 35 when you could last buy one was well over $200,000 from Porsche.
24:24
And this was a much more cost effective.
24:26
Most of the teams that got these were not OE manufacturer
24:29
related, but they were race teams.
24:31
And when the business of racing and we were trying to create an environment
24:34
where they could be successful as teams with sponsors and everything else.
24:38
So we kept morphing to new cars and everybody says, well,
24:41
how did you think of this?
24:43
Pretty simple.
24:44
We needed a car that was half the price that could perform as good or
24:47
better than what already existed.
24:49
And then we figured out moving backwards from that end point
24:52
of how to get there techniques.
24:53
And what was frightening is none of us were engineers, but there were
24:56
simple pieces of this, which were, the engine had to be made available
25:00
to anybody who wanted to buy it.
25:02
Car had to have two distinct things.
25:04
It had to carry 32 gallons of gas.
25:06
The driver's feet had to be behind the center line of the front axles
25:09
when the pedals were depressed.
25:11
This was the era where India and F1 guys all had broken feet and legs
25:14
'cause they stuck out and they were the first thing to hit the fence.
25:16
And when they went into it.
25:17
But you can watch this video from Laguna of how this car could
25:21
just kind of drive around people.
25:22
That's Danny and guys in a Porsche.
25:24
He just drove by him like he was tied to a tree.
25:26
That's John Paul.
25:27
Same thing.
25:27
He's taking an outside line and turn 10 that you don't normally do.
25:31
You're in the inside and he just drove by and it's all because of the ground.
25:34
There's another good shot of watch how it's squares off these
25:37
corners compared to the Porsche.
25:39
It just was an amazing revelation because people didn't realize what
25:43
the impact of that technology would be until they saw it and went, oh.
25:47
We need to get one of these.
25:49
So that was sort of the end of the 9 35.
25:50
This is the first race that the car raced in and it won.
25:53
It started fifth.
25:55
Brian Redmond worked his way through the field, not by going any faster,
25:58
but the speed the car could run.
25:59
You could run the whole race at, well, the nine 30 fives, the Fords, all
26:03
those other cars had tire degradation.
26:05
They had too much power on two back wheels.
26:07
These cars have the right amount of power, the right weight and the arrow
26:11
package just made 'em really good.
26:13
Another limerock shot.
26:14
This is, uh, one of the coolest cars we ever developed with
26:17
Audi, which also became the biggest pain in the butt for us.
26:19
But this is, uh, the Audi 90 GTO car, full tube frame, five cylinder inline
26:24
turbo hunch Stook, Hurley Haywood, and occasionally Walter Royal, the
26:28
rally driver, who even people like hunch Stook said when he showed up.
26:31
I raced for second.
26:32
The man was amazing.
26:33
So this is Lime Rock again, doing wheelies up the hill.
26:36
The intriguing thing was constant all-wheel drive car, which meant it
26:40
applied the drive you wanted on each wheel based on the grip level that
26:44
the car was sensing that it needed.
26:46
It wasn't 20% front, 80% back, it was applying that drive to
26:51
the wheels as it saw it needed.
26:53
So the hard part of it was we started it out.
26:55
Goodyear made 'em special tires.
26:57
14 inches wide.
26:58
We realized after a couple races, they didn't go to Daytona and Sebring because
27:01
they didn't think they could finish.
27:02
So.
27:03
They started on 14th.
27:06
We summed down two, three races, changed that to 12 and then changed it
27:10
to 10, a couple races later, and the end result was, it made no difference.
27:13
The 10 inch wide tires work just as good as the 14 inch tire.
27:17
Part of the reasons and the learning experience for us was technically
27:20
what's going on with a car like this is the tire degradation is way better.
27:25
The load of slowing down is spread over all four wheels.
27:29
The braking was much better.
27:30
And the acceleration was phenomenal.
27:32
And there's some video of people like Ook would just pass people in the dirt or
27:37
the grass because the car could do that.
27:39
So the rest of the guys are like, what's he doing?
27:40
He just drove me around me on the dirt.
27:42
So it was an amazing car.
27:43
It is probably, in my opinion, one of the coolest, most technically
27:48
advanced things that IMSA created.
27:50
We did some other stuff, but this one was sort of a challenge
27:53
for them and us to do this.
27:54
They won the TransAm the year before with a car, an Audi 100.
27:58
Made out of a real production shell.
28:00
This has nothing to do with that other than the greenhouse
28:02
silhouette and so on, so forth.
28:03
But spectacular Car two remain.
28:06
One is here in USA and one is in Germany.
28:08
And the significance to Audi is when they just showed their first concept
28:11
Formula One car, the car that's behind the Formula one car in their display
28:15
is that car, not the R eight prototype.
28:18
That's off to the side, but that car is right there.
28:20
That embodies Audi's performance thing, and it's 1989.
28:24
Pretty amazing what they were able to do and how they did it.
28:27
So more pictures.
28:28
Here's the L is now taken the front all the time.
28:32
And then Bob Tulia showed up with Jaguars with Big V 12 engines.
28:36
One of the only teams in history whose people were always dressed
28:38
in white and never got dirty.
28:40
Not sure how they did that, but I think they had enough uniforms
28:44
in the truck that if you did, you had to go change right away.
28:46
But yeah.
28:46
How many people have white crew guys, you know, beautiful car.
28:50
Lee Drester design actually originated by Mike Dale, who was the head of uh, Jaguar,
28:54
USA, had nothing to do with England.
28:56
They didn't want anything to do with it, so they did it here themselves again.
29:00
One of IMSA's goals was to provide the industry designers constructors,
29:04
the opportunity to make a living and a business in this kind of race.
29:07
So another example of that beautiful car.
29:11
This is the hairpin at Miami.
29:12
In the first treat races, which is the next sort of episode where
29:15
we talked about racing on roads.
29:17
Well, it came back with a vengeance in the eighties.
29:20
At one point we had five downtown street races.
29:23
Different concept, which was we're gonna bring this show to people.
29:27
In their face, which is gonna mess up their town for at least a month
29:30
so they'll know it's happening.
29:31
Okay?
29:31
The buses didn't run.
29:32
It was, we messed everything up.
29:34
But when all said and done, we turned on a lot of people to the game that would not
29:37
have otherwise ever seen it, and it was spectacular to watch another innovation.
29:42
The first plastic engine, it was tour on two liter.
29:45
Most of the internal components are carbon or plastic, sponsored by Amaco.
29:50
It actually got two podium finishes in Camel Lights.
29:52
This is also early eighties.
29:55
So we had a lot of innovative stuff going on and welcomed it.
29:59
You know, we looked at what we did as a place for people to try new things.
30:02
Some of 'em worked, some of 'em didn't.
30:04
But I threw this in here only because a lot of people don't know about it, but.
30:07
It actually scored two third places in a pretty competitive category
30:11
in an engine made outta plastic.
30:12
This is interesting.
30:13
This is John Bishop's original drawing, which he drew in the meeting
30:16
when we started arguing with Porsche between the 9 5 6 group C car and our
30:21
desire for a different kind of car.
30:23
So what's different?
30:24
We put out our GTP rules with the A CO in 1980.
30:27
It required that engine to be available, no aluminum roll cages, which the FIA
30:33
insisted was okay, which never was.
30:35
Everyone we ever saw failed and the driver had to be behind the front axle.
30:39
John actually sketched this in the boardroom at Porsche Stuttgart and
30:43
showed it to him and says, here, you can lengthen it in the back or you can
30:46
lengthen it in the front, but you gotta make it longer to get the driver moved.
30:50
And you can't have aluminum roll cages, and you gotta have an
30:54
engine that everybody can get.
30:55
So the group C formula, for those who don't know, was a fuel formula,
30:59
more endurance championship Lama took kind of the same thing, the 56
31:04
version, the group C car, which was shorter driver out front, the one that
31:07
Stefan Beov was killed in its spa.
31:09
And it probably, I don't wanna say it would be avoidable, but the way
31:13
he was positioned in the car and what happened to the car was tragic.
31:16
Should not have been that bad, but it did.
31:18
They lasted about two years.
31:20
And then finally after some bad accidents in Group C, they adopted
31:24
IMSA's GTP rules because it made sense.
31:27
And again, none of us are engineers, but we just looked at this thing and said.
31:30
This can't be right.
31:31
There is a better way to do this, and we just did what we thought was correct.
31:35
9 56 is probably the least successful Porsche car in that regard.
31:40
In the 62, I think they built 145 of them.
31:43
So you think about that 145 race cars that started at about 300 grand and at the end
31:47
a decade later were 700 grand, but they still built 145 of 'em and sold them.
31:52
So that's what the fields kind of look like.
31:53
You got a Porsche Buick, March Jaguars.
31:56
We had a lot of diversity.
31:57
We had nine OE manufacturers in GTP in the eighties, as well as, I think five or
32:02
six more in Camel Light, which was a lower division using normally aspirated engines,
32:06
which is kind of where the gentleman guys went 'cause it was an easier car.
32:09
These things started getting really fast.
32:12
Miami, this is what street racing was like in the early eighties.
32:16
Biscayne Boulevard.
32:17
On the right pit lanes to the left.
32:18
You could see cars coming around.
32:20
Turn one.
32:21
It was amazing to do this.
32:23
I remember the first race had Sterling Moss as the color commentator on
32:28
tv, and he was just fascinated because street racing at that
32:32
point was pretty much Monaco.
32:34
That was it.
32:34
So we did this, then we did West Palm, then we did San Antonio, then
32:37
we did Columbus, then we did New Orleans, and we just kept going.
32:40
And the economic benefit was huge.
32:42
The pushback from people whose businesses got messed up and couldn't get on the bus
32:46
and everything else was equally great.
32:48
Noise wasn't that big of an issue because everybody knew it was gonna be noisy.
32:51
Just to give you an example, race control, the high rise building on
32:55
the left was a new building and we were like 20 stories up and had a
32:59
commanding view of the entire area.
33:01
This is right along Biscayne Bay.
33:02
The cruise ship port is to the left.
33:04
It was just spectacular.
33:05
Great idea.
33:06
Firestone Fire Hawk.
33:08
All right, other great idea.
33:09
We took street cars.
33:11
Told everybody to take the carpets out, put a bolt-in, roll cage
33:14
in it that you could take out.
33:16
If we ask you to take out, in other words, it could not be firmly affixed to the car.
33:19
It had to be bolted in steel fire bottle.
33:22
That was it.
33:22
Belts and a seat.
33:23
Go race it.
33:24
So those were street cars, which everybody said there's no fuel cells,
33:27
there's none of this, none of that.
33:28
The standard of construction of these cars in that day was such that they were.
33:32
Five layers of steel around the fuel tank already.
33:35
It was past the Ford Pinto I explode experiences of a decade earlier.
33:40
They were pretty solid cars.
33:42
We'd roll these things up and what was cool is you could wreck it on
33:45
a test day, go down a dealership, buy another one, and build it
33:48
overnight and go race the next day.
33:49
How bad was that?
33:50
But you could see there's Dodge Chargers, BMWs, Camaros, Mustangs,
33:54
just about everything you could.
33:56
Now, what happened over time?
33:57
We had three or four categories.
33:59
Each category, we listed a group of cars, and out of that group, maybe three or
34:03
four were really in that configuration, competitive with each other.
34:07
Some of them were just hopeless.
34:09
You didn't wanna run eos, they were terrible, but people tried.
34:13
Picture of a Jaguar V 12, six and a half and seven liter engines based
34:17
on the production Jaguar engine.
34:19
Beautiful sound, very competitive.
34:21
Another great picture from Sebring where you can see this Porsche is going
34:25
down hangar straight at about 180.
34:27
And there are people sitting in the grass to the left, and then there's a chain
34:31
link fence, and then there's more people.
34:33
And somehow we didn't manage to kill anybody, though.
34:35
We certainly had all the parts to do that.
34:37
No big accidents, but not what we do today.
34:40
But this is about mid eighties.
34:41
Bruce Levin's car, Daytona at night.
34:44
Just a cool shot.
34:45
That's a Nissan GTP car in the last one.
34:47
And an interesting thing is the what shown this week.
34:50
Of course, with endurance racing, we got the moniker of Racing with a Difference.
34:54
We race at night and we race in the rain, and sometimes we race at night in
34:57
the rain, which makes it really nasty.
34:59
What I'm trying to illustrate here is just how people have adapted these
35:02
cars to take on different race lengths, different kinds of racetrack, angling
35:06
the lights out so that you could see where the wall was, was essential.
35:09
This is pre-live tv.
35:12
During the races, so now it's lit somewhat better.
35:15
You can actually drive Daytona at night without headlights.
35:18
People can't see you coming, but you could see where you're going.
35:20
But back then you had to have lights and they had to work
35:23
and they had to work this way.
35:24
And places like Sebring, the old 5.2 mile track, part of
35:27
which was that 86 Havelin car.
35:29
If you lost your headlights or your alternate or your battery went dead,
35:32
there were times where guys just stopped and had to wait till the end
35:34
of a session 'cause they couldn't find their way back to the pits.
35:36
That dark, certainly at speed, you wouldn't even try to pretty, uh, heroic
35:41
if you won there in those conditions.
35:43
As a driver, it was not just consequential, it was
35:46
heroically consequential.
35:48
Okay.
35:48
Castrol Jag.
35:49
These are the English cars from Walkinshaw.
35:51
They replaced Jaguar finally adopted the GTP concept for Group C as well,
35:56
so they were able to build new cars.
35:58
Came in a variety of forms, V twelves at seven liters, twin turbo v sixes.
36:02
The XJR 14, which comes up later was the Ross Bra Design Formula One designers
36:07
version of a car powered by a Cosworth.
36:09
But really super big program.
36:10
Castrol, yours truly at the Ferrari Museum.
36:13
I throw this in there for my own benefit, but I was the guy that had to
36:16
go over there and homologate this car, Ferrari F 40, which is 1989 to run in
36:21
GT racing, both in the US and Europe.
36:23
So whenever I go back there, they always remind me I did two cars with Ferrari.
36:27
That one in the 3 3 3 SP prototype, which will come up in a bit.
36:30
So this one sits in the Ferrari museum.
36:32
Hurley Haywood actually drove it.
36:34
People don't realize that Hurley Haywood drove Audis.
36:36
He drove Porsches, he drove Ferraris, he drove Jaguars.
36:38
He drove a lot of stuff, but he lives and breathes Porsches great guy.
36:42
Daytona Castro, banking early in the morning.
36:46
They won in 90 and in 88.
36:48
Another beautiful piece.
36:49
The ni Nissans hard to miss these cars.
36:51
This is the second generation GTP car.
36:54
Okay?
36:54
This has got some nasty, uh, accident stuff in it.
36:56
This is where I talk about how the cars exceeded the racetrack.
37:00
What's going on here is Road.
37:01
Atlanta has not got a chicane.
37:03
It is a flat out turn seven to turn, what is now 12, run 210.
37:09
There's a dip in the middle, the dip and the downforce.
37:13
At this point, these cars were running 7,500 to 8,000 pounds rear springs.
37:18
They needed springs like that to keep the car from grinding into the road.
37:22
That plus the weight of the car.
37:24
You go down to a in a dip at 200 miles an hour, what's gonna happen?
37:27
The tires are gonna explode.
37:29
It's a little gruesome, but nobody got seriously hurt.
37:32
Same race, both cars.
37:33
There was a third one with the Toyota, which managed to get back to the
37:36
pits 'cause it landed right side up.
37:38
These guys didn't Pretty destructive.
37:40
So this is when we started thinking about, okay, this stuff is simply going too fast.
37:45
We don't need to go that fast to put on a quality show.
37:48
To put on good entertainment.
37:49
We're not in the business of wrecking this stuff this way.
37:51
After that particular race, Goodyear refused to supply tires to these teams
37:55
until they told them actually what the downforce potential would be.
37:58
'cause the cars just exceeded what they could possibly do.
38:01
So some other footage from this era, Holbert was the dominant
38:04
car, the eighties followed by the Nissans in the late eighties.
38:07
One of IMSA's most iconic car, low and brow car.
38:10
John Lamers put that one in the fence when he went out of the pits
38:12
with cold tires and new brake pads.
38:14
Oops.
38:15
Which is still happening today at Daytona Sebring.
38:18
Again, that's turn one.
38:19
Before there was the change in the track, the original Nissan GTP car.
38:24
So at this point we had five or six major factory teams.
38:27
We, once again, were struggling with a private tier, could not get the hardware
38:31
to be able to compete with these people.
38:33
Starting to think about what's next when this goes.
38:36
We also were made aware at the time that RJ Reynolds, because of federal law, would
38:39
have to stop their sponsorship in 1993.
38:42
So we had a number of things going on into the next decade.
38:46
The bishops and the original stockholders, the Francis and two
38:49
other groups of stockholders sold IMSA to a businessman in Tampa, who
38:53
was also the promoter of the St.
38:54
Pete Grand Prix race.
38:55
Mike Cohen and Jeff Parker.
38:57
It wasn't the best idea.
38:58
Neither one of 'em were racers.
39:00
If you wanna read the gory details, I wrote a book about it with George
39:03
Silverman, Mike Compatriot with this, they would do stuff like Mike
39:06
was a construction guy, so he would take the purse for the 24 hours a
39:09
Daytona, and he would use that to bond jobs for the state of Florida.
39:13
I could say this now because when he finally got caught up,
39:16
he did 15 years state and 15 years federal, non concurrent.
39:20
Just got outta jail about two years ago.
39:23
It was strange days, but basically he lasted three years and then basically
39:28
sold to another guy who actually was a great guy, Charlie Slater, but the guy
39:33
who talked Charlie Slater into buying it.
39:35
It was the same guy that talked Mike Cone into buying it.
39:37
He was the promoter at Tampa and St. Pete, both of which were temporary
39:41
circuit events that failed mid nineties.
39:43
In spite of all these underlying bad things going on, we exported our GT stuff
39:48
first to Japan and we took, uh, anywhere from six to eight cars and helped the
39:53
JAF develop what is now super gt super GT cars are essentially derivatives of
39:58
the car on the right, which is a 300 ZX Cunningham car built in California.
40:03
Just to show them this Nissan set this up at Fuji.
40:06
There's the road car, there's the race car.
40:08
The whole idea was to capture the spirit of the streetcar, but make it a real
40:12
race car that makes it cheaper to run.
40:14
We brought six or seven cars at their request.
40:16
We ran two years at Fuji, one year at auto topless, I think.
40:19
So three races where they started running, uh, Nismo Skylines.
40:23
A modified group A cars and started developing a tube frame structured car,
40:29
which then grew into what they do now, which is very similar to this, even
40:33
beyond that, without much help from us, other than bringing a variety of GTO and
40:38
GTU cars and American iron and opening them up and letting all the, their mo OE
40:42
manufacturers just come and look at the cars and ask questions, how they made,
40:45
what do you use, and so on and so forth.
40:47
It too developed their own industry of parts and component manufacturers
40:51
for their own cars, which is great.
40:53
That was one of the big goals of IMSA was always to focus on that.
40:57
Chevy Intrepid, Wayne Taylor, 1991.
41:00
1991, was the most successful GTP year because every OE manufacturer won at
41:04
least one race, which rarely happened.
41:06
The last nine 60 twos.
41:07
This is Rob Dyson's.
41:09
Quite a bit different than the earlier Holbrook pictures, A
41:11
lot more arrow stuff on it.
41:13
Triple element wing on the back, which originally was one element.
41:16
The car won races in 1984, and it won its final race in 1993.
41:21
And the reason I bring that up is the original layout of A GTP car.
41:25
John Bishop drew on a piece of paper in his office in front of
41:27
myself, Roger Bailey and Charlie Rainville, and that drawing remained
41:31
in the IMSA Rule book for a decade.
41:33
Unchanged.
41:34
So when people talk about stability, people like Rob Dyson invested in these
41:38
cars and he raced them for 10 years.
41:40
Modified 'em, but it's the American hot rod mentality.
41:42
You gotta fix it somehow.
41:43
There's the XJR 14 brilliant car.
41:46
Look at the size of the arrow device.
41:47
On the back of that.
41:48
The spray gives you some idea what's going on, but the air going under the car.
41:51
This car, Davey Jones said many times, 73 to 7,500 pound rear springs on it.
41:56
But it's basically a Formula One car with a three and a half liter engine.
42:00
Widen tub holding 32 gallons of gas.
42:02
Great little car, super quick.
42:04
Davey Jones was one of our really good drivers, but the best company I ever
42:09
heard was Tony Dow, who managed the British cars, said uh, Davey Jones has
42:13
wrecked every model of GTP and Group C car we've ever made at least once.
42:18
So you know, you got guys that are really fast, but you gotta expect them
42:21
to damage the hardware occasionally or total it as he did a few times.
42:25
Then came the Toyota's.
42:26
This is gurney's effort.
42:27
These cars were culmination of three generations of previous designs
42:31
that became the dominant cars.
42:32
What's really unique about this car is if you notice, there's no holes in
42:36
it other than the hole in the front.
42:37
All of the air going through the car created, added down force inside
42:41
the car on a second floor, all the air for the radiators, intercos, and
42:45
the only thing sticking out of those two little black things, which are
42:48
brake ducts for the rear brake, but everything else went through the car.
42:51
The tall scoop on the side was an intake for the turbo, just because it needed
42:55
the cleaner air, because at the time the air got from the front to the engine
42:58
bay for the turbo was pretty agitated.
43:00
These cars also ran 7,500 pound springs.
43:04
It was a 2.1 liter engine running 125 inches of boost and could
43:08
make if they wanted a thousand horsepower out, a two liter.
43:11
They didn't run that long that way, but it was there if you wanted it.
43:14
Great cars having gurney in the series from GTU to GTO to GTP for
43:19
close to a decade was a treat.
43:22
Wonderful man.
43:23
That was the year they won 24 hours, 93.
43:26
We had carbon breaks by then, as you can see.
43:28
So Japan, here's the group of cars we took to our topless.
43:31
Seven of them, the whole group.
43:33
That was a lot of fun.
43:34
The Japanese were great hosts, but they also, you know, you see some of them, we
43:38
had Exxon at that time instead of Camel.
43:40
So because it was international, half the cars had so on it because they were
43:43
still using Theso name overseas and not here, but Exxon was the US that's
43:48
pouring rain at Fuji Lightener, GTU car and the two Cunningham, GTO cars in the.
43:53
This is another weird car.
43:55
This is the most successful Porsche car ever raced.
43:58
This is the Jaguar Bud Light car that you saw earlier.
44:02
With the rain coming out the back, they cut the roof off of it.
44:05
Well, first what they did was they sold that car to Mazda, who ran it in
44:08
Group C with a Mazda badged Cosworth engine, same car, but they changed
44:12
it from a Jag to a Mazda just by putting Mazda covers on the engine.
44:16
And they did that for about three, four months and decided that wasn't worth it.
44:19
So Val Perez, Indiana, they had two or three of these chassis and.
44:22
Tony Dow Max Welty, who was the Porsche head of Motorsport at
44:26
Allen Springer in California, go.
44:27
We need to do something with these.
44:28
What'd they do?
44:29
They drop the 9 62 spec engine in the back of one of these
44:32
things, which cut the roof off.
44:35
Reinforced the roll cage structures you could see with forward and rear braces.
44:38
This is Mario Andrei testing it at Charlotte and it's the most successful
44:42
car because in 1995 with the beginning of world sports cars, which side story?
44:49
We knew in 93 no more GTP cars.
44:51
So we had a new sponsor, which was Exxon.
44:53
They had two requests, make the cars look different because we
44:55
don't want to be viewed as taking over someone else's old stuff.
44:59
And two, we need more of 'em.
45:01
So the whole idea, again, was another technical shift to develop a car
45:05
that private teams could buy and run.
45:08
And so the World Sports Car was born.
45:10
I bring this one up because it's so unique.
45:12
It only raced in our races once after the roar.
45:15
The test at Daytona in the beginning of January.
45:18
Kramer had a CK five, which was a similar car made out of a 9 62 chassis.
45:22
He brought one.
45:23
Porsche brought two of these and we changed the rules on 'em between
45:26
then and the race because we recognized that we really didn't
45:29
set up world sports cars for turbos.
45:32
We were trying to extend an arm to Lamar to go, you need to get rid
45:35
of what you were now running, which are GT one cars and McLaren F ones.
45:39
Porsche GT one cars, which at the time cost about $1.5 million a
45:43
piece unavailable to everybody.
45:45
Factory made so many and that was it done.
45:48
So you're limiting your field.
45:49
You're not looking forward about how you're gonna sustain this.
45:52
So we needed cars like this that customer cars could be made out of existing stuff.
45:57
So it never raced at Daytona that year.
46:00
However, the Kramer CK five, the older version, won the race under the rules that
46:04
Porsche didn't like with the same engine.
46:06
I say it's the most successful.
46:07
It ran Lama twice, won both times.
46:09
Finish second.
46:10
A third time, and then no finish.
46:12
Second at Petite Lamont.
46:13
19 98, 3 years later, we also extended a series to, um, central and South
46:18
America, the NA Cam, Marlboro GT series.
46:20
Again, IMSA Cars, IMSA Rules, IMSA teams, a place for them to sell their cars.
46:24
Another good view of the World Sports Car taking the roof off.
46:27
That's, uh, Andy Wallace, or might be Derek.
46:30
And you could kind of see who was driving the car and what he was driving it with.
46:33
So it was kind of a good view.
46:34
James Weaver and Rob Dyson's Spice with a Ferrari engine in it.
46:37
Again, all that stuff was generally available.
46:39
Wayne Taylor won the first championship in a rotary powered car by not
46:43
winning a race, but finishing in the top five, I think, 12 times.
46:46
The car of the decade is clearly the 3, 3, 3 sp.
46:49
This car again, I went to Ferrari with Jumpier.
46:52
Met with Montezemolo and Pirro Ferrari and said, we need a customer car.
46:56
So they committed to making this car solely for customers.
47:00
Ferrari never ran one themselves.
47:02
Pure customer car is exactly what we wanted.
47:05
It wasn't that expensive as Pirro Ferrari said.
47:07
The little badge on the front end, that's $25,000 just to get the little
47:10
badge on it 'cause it's a Ferrari badge.
47:12
So there was a little inflation to that.
47:14
But you bought a car, you got an engine.
47:15
Four corners, and a full body and a transmission.
47:18
For about three quarters of a million dollars and that was most
47:20
of the parts you needed to run a whole season, including the car.
47:23
It's a great deal.
47:24
Rob Dyson.
47:24
The other great car was the Riley.
47:26
Many engine combinations in it.
47:28
Great shot of the Ferrari.
47:29
They spit flames out the back and made great noises with
47:31
a V 12 turning 12,500 RPM.
47:34
It's magic spectators loved them.
47:36
GT cars still the mainstay.
47:39
99 Audi and BMW showed up at this point.
47:42
The A CO and the FIA adopted IMSS W World Sports Car Rules, but then
47:46
had to put their mark on it so they put bigger engines in it and put
47:49
aerodynamic diffusers on 'em on cars that weren't designed to have 'em, which
47:53
immediately obsoleted all the Ferrari and made the Audi and the BM BMW cars.
47:57
That's a six liter V 12, the car to have.
48:00
As you can see here, all the old cars are in the back.
48:03
The two Panos is the two BMWs.
48:05
The Lowell is a new car, but then you got the Ferrari's and the Riley's in
48:08
the back, and they could no longer compete with the cars at the front.
48:11
Grand Dam comes along 19 99, 19 97.
48:14
George Silverman and I left when Andy Evans acquired imsa, which was the fifth
48:18
owner in seven years, and decided we didn't like to work under his ethics.
48:23
So IMSA got split in half.
48:26
Half of the people, the management and.
48:28
Director type level people ended up in NASCAR Daytona, the rank
48:32
and file people, part-time.
48:34
People that ran the races as race staff ended up getting the contract to
48:38
run the A LMS with Don Panos program.
48:40
Again, new car.
48:42
We had to get rid of the old world sports cars again.
48:44
Grand Dam did Daytona prototypes.
48:45
Interesting design Ford.
48:47
Lexus.
48:48
Lexus.
48:48
Ford.
48:49
That's Adorn, which became a Dara Riley.
48:52
So what happened there was the benefit Grand Am had was at the time
48:56
International Speedway Corporation.
48:57
We had Daytona, we had Watkins Glen, we had Phoenix, we had Fontana,
49:02
we had racetracks that we owned that let us race there reasonably.
49:06
The A LMS had Sebring in Atlanta, and we both would pick up mid
49:10
Ohio or Three Rivers or some other events to build out a schedule.
49:14
We used to go to the Glen twice.
49:16
We used to go to Daytona twice, but basically for about six or seven
49:20
years, these two things ran in parallel with opposite philosophies.
49:23
One was cost effective, lots of cars, all prototypes in
49:26
that shot, there's no GT cars.
49:28
A LMS had OE Manufacturers spending a lot of marketing dollars.
49:32
But they didn't have very big fields or lots of cars.
49:35
They had a connection with LAMA and eventually, by the early teens, I don't
49:39
wanna say one was better than the other, they were two different philosophies.
49:42
But Grand Am had pretty much caught up and passed TV viewership on the car count,
49:48
and on the spectator attendance at events.
49:50
And then the smarter people got involved and said, why don't we combine these
49:53
two things and make something better?
49:54
And that's where we are today.
49:56
We also did some cool stuff.
49:57
This is Mike Shank, breaking the World Close Course Speed record at Daytona,
50:01
which was held for 20 something years by the Mercedes C one 11 done
50:05
at Nardo in Italy, which I think is a seven mile or nine mile oval.
50:09
He beat it with a three liter eco-boost turbo production engine.
50:12
You could see the line.
50:14
You could see the four decimal points, pretty high tech stuff
50:17
when we would do stuff like that along the lines of Bonneville.
50:21
Then DP version three.
50:22
These are the Corvettes.
50:23
The final version, there were three generations of DP cars and A LMS.
50:27
You have the Audi, the Corvettes.
50:29
They were definitely the A LMS cars.
50:31
Panos.
50:32
This is a classic end of race.
50:34
This is Yorg Burmeister, and I forget who's driving the Corvette.
50:37
It's not very friendly at all, as you can about to see.
50:43
Oh yeah.
50:43
See that?
50:43
That's a wall that was to the flag.
50:47
So the Porsche won the race.
50:48
The Corvette was second, but crossed the line backwards shedding
50:51
parts, but luckily I didn't have to have anything to do with that.
50:53
Vipers another Corvette.
50:55
Beautiful cars.
50:57
Now we're getting near the end.
50:57
This is D-P-I-D-P-I followed the merger between two years of running
51:03
A LMS and Grand Am Cars together, and then creating a new car.
51:07
This is very similar to the car we have now without the hybrids.
51:11
So at this point, IMSA is starting to really boom.
51:14
When I say boom, record crowds great TV numbers, social media is,
51:18
is exploding and it just grew from this point to where we are today.
51:23
This was last lap at Petite Lamar.
51:25
Diehard passed, but he's going so slow.
51:27
The car he is trying to pass past them going down the hill
51:29
and he still finished second.
51:30
We don't push for that, but it's so competitive and so close.
51:34
People talk about BOP and all the rule stuff.
51:36
We're working margins of 0.03%.
51:40
Where some of the teams, the two drivers cannot drive the same car on the same
51:45
day within that number, and yet the manufacturers want us to fix that.
51:48
It's like, no, some ending ones.
51:49
We do this now every year at Daytona.
51:51
That's the field for the Rolex 24, probably two years ago.
51:54
Turn one SE bring just GT cars this time.
51:57
Huge.
51:57
We have 18 OEM partnership agreements with car manufacturers.
52:01
Most of anyone in the world right now, Penske's, Porsches, Roger Penske,
52:06
said when they first tested this car in Barcelona, these are the most
52:09
technically advanced race cars on the planet, including Formula One, IndyCar.
52:13
Anything else?
52:14
They are made with stuff that was not off the shelf.
52:18
Everything in these cars, hybrid wise, battery wise, MGU Wise was
52:21
developed specifically for this.
52:23
Again, in order to have a life until now, 2030.
52:26
So we'll be using this componentry and it has scalability for another five years.
52:31
Easy.
52:32
Cars are really cool.
52:33
They do really great things.
52:34
They leave the pits on the electric, they have no alternator, and they
52:38
just hit the ignition button and the car starts itself from the electric.
52:42
It's got an 800 volt battery in it.
52:44
The 800 volt battery can give it 150 more horsepower, not on
52:47
demand, but over a period of time.
52:49
It regenerates itself when you're on the brakes and when you disengage the
52:53
clutch, the input shaft, that's where the MGU works is the input shaft BMWs.
52:59
They just debuted their second generation of the car at Daytona last weekend.
53:02
Here you have Aston Martin, and again, off we go.
53:06
So Daytona tells us the Rolex 24 now is the second most profitable event at
53:10
the racetrack after the Daytona 500.
53:12
So road racing and sporty car stuff has come a long way, but you can see
53:16
how quick these things are at Daytona.
53:18
Now they're slightly over 200.
53:20
I threw this in just to give some idea of IMSA and the Corvette
53:24
from the third car from the top.
53:26
It is all IMSA, A LMS, grand Am.
53:29
Corvettes first two?
53:31
No, the third one is a Greenwood, so that's where it starts, but it's kind
53:34
of a neat photo to show how GM is used.
53:37
Motorsports and Corvette, final picture, that's the Bishop France trophy.
53:41
Every champion of every class.
53:43
In the overall division, G-T-O-G-T-U-G-T-X-G-T-P, on the
53:48
front straightaway in front of the new tower building at Road
53:51
Atlanta with the Michelin man on it.
53:53
And uh, I'm done.
53:55
Thank you.
54:00
Where all the pictures came from.
54:04
I am sure there's some questions, mark.
54:06
That was absolutely fabulous and I don't know if we wanna open it up for questions.
54:10
How old were you when you started, uh, with John Bishop?
54:13
I was, had just turned 16 in the spring of 1974 and I did my 50th 24
54:19
hour race this year of only two years.
54:21
One year I was actually kind of helping John Cooper at the Speedway
54:24
after Andy Evans took over.
54:26
George and I went over there at their request and then by 99 I was over there
54:30
regularly beginning to make Grand Am for.
54:32
Bill Junior and Jim Franz been a great run.
54:35
I think the most important thing, which I could talk to, you know, the cars
54:38
are cool and the events are cool and I took a lot of notes, but the people.
54:41
Do you have the opportunity to work with your parents, John and Peg Bishop?
54:45
Priceless.
54:45
You know, I've been given great guidance, great teachings was told.
54:50
Day one, you can make every mistake you want.
54:52
Once, second time we're gonna start thinking you're stupid.
54:54
And I said, okay, I don't wanna be stupid.
54:56
That was direct quote.
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