Is there an endurance race in Road America's future? IMSA President John Doonan addresses that and much more.
John Doonan visited Road America for the first time when he was 6 weeks old and his father, a grassroots sports car racer, was competing in the June Sprints a couple of hours north of their suburban Chicago home.
For so many years Doonan played with his Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars there that he jokes he still has Elkhart Lake dirt under his fingernails.
When he was 9 years old, he saw his first IMSA sports car race at the track, the Pabst 500, won by the BMW 320i Turbo shared by David Hobbs and Derek Bell.
So yes, this weekend is bigger than most on the calendar for Doonan, as the organization he now runs will race at the track he calls home, where every IMSA weekend is an unofficial reunion of family and friends.
Ahead of the weekend – highlighted by the 2-hour, 40-minute WeatherTech SportsCar Championship race set for 10:40 a.m. Sunday – Doonan spoke with the Journal Sentinel about the present and future of IMSA and the message he’ll deliver Friday in his third “state of the sport” address since becoming president.
Here are highlights.
A number of people have discovered RA the last couple of years. If their point of reference is NASCAR Cup, how would you describe IMSA, particularly as it relates to the Road America experience?
I tell people first of all about the track, it is a national park and there happens to be a racetrack woven through it. It’s the beauty of the place. The way the Kettle Moraine region is has always struck me.
For IMSA, it is the heartbeat of the auto industry, it’s 18 manufacturers competing with us, both in a single-make championship – as you know, we’ll have the Porsche Carerra Cup and the Lamborghini Super Trofeo there – but then when you get into the Michelin Pilot Challenge, there’s really an auto row, like a row of dealerships on the grid because you’ve got every brand imaginable racing either in the GS category with those cars or TCR and in WeatherTech it’s the same thing, whether it’s prototypes or the GT categories, it’s a who’s-who of automotive brands and they’ve used this platform to tell their story.
To see that kind of variety on track in both prototypes and GT cars I think is what makes us so unique.
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So the NASCAR-type fan … you’re all racing, but there’s a little bit of apples-and-oranges there. If someone liked Cup at Road America, what do they need to do to similarly like IMSA there?
There are folks in the case of NASCAR Cup that have either a Chevy, Ford or Toyota brand affinity. In our case, we have all three of those. Chevrolet races with the Corvette in the WeatherTech Championship, the Camaro in Pilot; Toyota has the Lexus brand in GT and the Supra in Pilot; and the same with Ford with the Mustang.
So there’s a lot of brand affinity where essentially the cars themselves are the stars, and I think the simple difference of seeing the variety and then prototype vs. GT, where you have these closing speeds that are north of 50 or 60 mph with the prototypes.
And then there’s a race within a race, where the multi-class format really keeps fans on their toes and also gives the brands a chance to decide if it’s the design cues of the brand in a prototype – a Cadillac prototype that literally looks like a Cadillac road car – or in the GT categories cars that literally look like their road-going brothers and sisters. So for me, it’s the variety of it and the difference in speed that really sets it apart.
You won there with Mazda (as director of motorsports in 2019), which was a huge win for you, but in this role how do you define winning?
For me, first and foremost for our event promoters – I’m really good friends with Mike Kertcher at Road America and his staff – having the stream of fans come in through the gates, having the camping areas packed with families, people that have been going there for years and years and also a new crop of new fans who’ve never experienced it, and then when I win is putting a tremendous show on for those fans.
One of the challenges we have with the variety we have is to also have parity. So we work on a balance of performance, where you have front-engine cars, rear-engine cars, traditional GT cars like the Corvette or a Ferrari or a Porsche vs. a Lexus or a BMW, more of a sedan-looking car.
So we have a tall task to make all those cars compete on a level playing field. But for me, winning is when we put on an amazing show in front of a packed house, where Fireman’s Hill, Turn 5, Canada Corner, all those places are jam packed with people enjoying a picnic and also on the edge of their seats because of the close racing.
There seem to be fans hoping for a 6-hour race or whatever, ending at dusk … that sort of thing. Is that do-able? Reasonable?
The first thing we’re sensitive to is operating budgets for the teams because we have race formats like the Rolex 24, the 12 Hours of Sebring, Petit LeMans, which is 10 hours, and then the traditional 2 hour and 40 minutes. The longer we run, the more expensive it is.
As I stated in the beginning though, I started going to Road America when it was a 500-mile race for sports. I competed in the American Le Mans Series with Mazda and it was 4 hours, daylight into darkness. So we’re trying to continue to provide the manufacturers and teams with a reasonable budget and the fans also with a good show. Nothing to announce, but we are always looking for new opportunities to run a little bit longer. After all, we are endurance racing.
(Note: The Michelin Pilot Challenge race Saturday is a 4-hour timed event scheduled to start at 1:15 p.m.)
Understanding racing could be as easy as who crosses the line first, or you can get into strategies, etc. Multiple-class racing makes it trickier. How do you sell a newcomer on the idea that it’s OK to have five cars racing for the win but the best race may be a battle for 12th (overall) for a (class) win?
Several of our auto manufacturer partners have done ads explaining endurance racing and it is not necessarily easy to describe when you have multiple drivers, when you have multiple classes within a race. The unique thing is to have a team-based victory. The excitement maybe overcomes the complexity of it. But in the end you’ve got Cadillac and Acura currently competing – obviously Mazda was there before – for the overall win. You’ve got this variety of 10 manufacturers in GT competing for a win there.
When we turn the page into 2023 and beyond, we’ll have GTP cars back. Now you’re looking at eight to 10 GTP cars, prototypes, competing for the overall win. Brands make commitments to marketing plans, and they go in cycles. But if fans like what they see now in endurance sports car racing, it’s only going to get better.
You do your state of the sport Friday. Without giving away secrets, can you hint at your general message?
As we open up the GTP category, a lot of people have hung the moniker ‘golden era’ on that. For us it’s a little bit of back to the future. The GTP era is one that’s definitely bookmarked in the history books as a time when IMSA was at its heyday. We have obviously been pleased with what DPi did.
But now we’re taking it to the next level with even additional stories around the brands that have committed to designs of the prototypes, the look, the part of the brand they represent, but also an additional sustainability message with hybrid. And we continue to work with our partners at Michelin and our fuel partners on what the future looks like in terms of sustainability. So that’s really important for us and it’s important for the 18 automakers that race with us.
How is GTP coming, in general? Does everyone seem happy with the progress?
Yeah, now all four brands have been on track, Acura, BMW, Cadillac and Porsche. Anytime you launch a new racing program, there’s teething pains. What I’ve seen and being able to experience what I do from my new vantage point and coming from an OEM, I’ve never seen a group of manufacturers collaborate in a positive way to make sure the launch of this new platform goes smoothly, we put on a great show for the fans because of a lot of testing being done and durability of the package being validated.
So far, so good. But a long way to go, a lot of testing miles yet to be done before we kick it off at the Rolex 24 in January and then of course come back to Road America next summer.
Without telling people to forget about this coming weekend, what do you tell people about expectations for ’23? A bigger top class … what else?
Back in January this year, Ford announced they’re coming back with the Mustang in GT. That’s a 2024 program. My advice to anyone who hasn’t experienced it is come out. If you like what you see, it’s only going to get better for 2023 and beyond.
A larger contingent of cars in the top category, and of course a GT field that is extremely tight among brands that people see in the showroom or see on the street as they’re driving up to Road America. Enjoy what you see now, but it’s going to get better.
One of the benefits with the new car is basically you can race the same car in the top class worldwide. Why couldn’t that happen previously?
IMSA and the ACO (Automobile Club de l'Ouest) have had a longstanding partnership on regulations and things like that, but finally. … The fans have been asking for it, the manufacturers have been asking for it. We came to an agreement with the ACO that essentially what was going to be Daytona Prototype 2.0 became GTP and they adopted those same regulations for their top category.
It just opens up a whole new opportunity for the OEMs to race the same car at Le Mans, in the World Endurance Championship or in IMSA. So now fans on both sides of the Atlantic can see the best manufacturers, the best teams and the stars, the drivers that drive them, it’s what so many have been asking for for so many years. Now we finally got there with an agreement with the ACO to use the same set of regulations. I can’t wait. Events like the Rolex 24, the 12 Hours of Sebring, Le Mans, Petit Le Mans are literally going to be a best-of-the-best battle. It’s going to be goose-bump generating.
So the short answer is the decision makers decided to stop being stubborn and give people what they wanted?
Yeah, I think that’s a fair assessment for sure.
One of the things often touted about IMSA is competition among 18 manufacturers. Yet the key component of the top class next year is the shared hybrid system, right? How does the shared technology square with competition?
The cool opportunity that manufacturers have with the vision of Jim France in GTP was you’ve got the opportunity to choose whatever internal combustion engine you’d like from your lineup with a certain power level, you have the opportunity to choose a chassis partner and design the bodywork to speak your brand’s styling cues.
And then we also try to be a marketing platform for the auto industry. So many have talked hybrid, electrification, alternative fuels and things like that. As we talked to the OEMs, we also want to be conscientious of costs. So as we discussed the concept of utilizing a common hybrid system, everybody started coming to the table, everybody started shaking their heads yes at the table, so the OEMs that have committed – now six globally, five that have announced commitment to run in IMSA, including Lamborghini, which will be in ’24 – it made a lot of fiscal sense. It was a very cost-effective way to speak to sustainability, align with the auto industry in terms of a plug-in hybrid and also race for overall wins. So that’s what made sense to us, that’s what the OEMs and their boards have committed to.
Now it’s time to get all the systems functioning and just put on an incredible show next year. While the hybrid system is common, it was a sensible solution to keep costs in check so that development costs of systems like that don’t get completely out of control such that whoever spends the most wins. It’s quite the contrary.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Q&A with IMSA President John Doonan ahead of Road America race weekend
