DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – As the Rolex 24 at Daytona ticked down to winning time over the final four hours, one NASCAR Cup Series champion remained hopeful of his first overall victory Sunday while another’s debut ignominiously ended with a mechanical failure.
The Action Express Racing No. 31 Cadillac, whose Rolex 24 lineup includes defending Cup Series champion Chase Elliott, headed to the Daytona International Speedway garage out of contention after the car was stuck in gear while pole-sitter Felipe Nasr was leaving Turn 6 and entering the transition to the oval banking.
“I lost the drive and could hear a loud bang on the gearbox, that was the fourth gear done,” Nasr told NBC Sports pit reporter Parker Kligerman while the team fixed the car. “I don’t know what to say. I feel terrible for everybody. We put in such a good work all weekend. Last weekend starting on pole. I don’t know what to say, man. We’ve got to come back with better luck next time.
Running in the sister Action Express car, Johnson also was done after three times and more than three hours in the car on the 3.56-mile road course. The No. 48 Ally Cadillac remained very much in the hunt for an overall victory with two-time defending Rolex 24 winner Kamui Kobayashi, Mike Rockenfeller and Simon Pagenaud.
Though Johnson lost time in his final stint, he led for a while during an early morning outing after starting the race and said he improved throughout behind the wheel. After two hours of sleep, he was up by 5 a.m. and at the pit stand more than an hour ahead of getting in the car.
“I was trying to get some rest but just having so much fun, so I was curious how the car is performing and what’s taking place,” Johnson said. “And with the caution flags, it just pushed my time in the car back later and later, and I was definitely there much earlier than I needed to be. It’s been an amazing experience. Now these guys are really stepping up and showing what they have, and I really appreciate every lap I have. I’m learning so much with each lap that I make.”
This marked Johnson’s eighth Rolex 24 start but first in a decade and in the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship Series’ DPi division. The seven-time Cup champion is using the high-downforce sports cars to help prepare for the part-time schedule he’ll run in the 2021 NTT IndyCar Series.
“Last night, being able to lead and manage traffic was really a good stint for me,” he said. “I had the right flow in traffic. I seemed to just catch the right breaks. This most recent outing, Rocky and I were just talking about how those things come and go, there’s just a flow to a certain stint, and this morning’s stint did not go as I had hoped with flow and traffic.
Mike Rockenfeller was behind the wheel of the No. 48 Cadillac as the sun rose Sunday at Daytona International Speedway (Jasen Vinlove/USA TODAY Sports).
“It’s really been an eye-opening experience, and I knew the competition was going to be tough, but as I started looking at the names of the drivers on each of these teams, I just realized how competitive this DPi field is going to be, even when you look through GT and LMP divisions, there’s talent everywhere. The last time I ran this race, I don’t think the talent was as deep and consistent certainly in the top category. I’ve been losing times with ins and outs on cold tires and charging to the pit box, and just some of the small details I didn’t have to worry about in previous races here, because you weren’t at 10/10ths like they are now for a variety of reasons.”
He seemed to earn the respect of the other veterans, including three-time Indianapolis 500 winner Helio Castroneves, whose path crossed with Johnson during Sunday morning Zoom news conferences.
“Big congrats, man,” Castroneves told Johnson. “For you to be doing those things, I want to be like you. Absolutely awesome.”
Alexander Rossi led in the No. 10 Acura of Wayne Taylor Racing for a stretch Sunday morning (Jasen Vinlove/USA TODAY Sports).
Castroneves had good reason to be in his typically chipper mood after completing his time in the No. 10 Acura of Wayne Taylor Racing, which was vying for its third consecutive Rolex 24 victory.
After lacking speed over the first several hours, the Acuras of WTR and Meyer Shank Racing came to life as the sun rose over the track.
Driving the No. 10 (which made the switch to Acura in the offseason after winning two of the past three Rolex 24s with a Cadillac), Alexander Rossi held the lead for long stretches of the morning, including a spirited battle between the 2016 Indy 500 winner and Formula One veteran Kevin Magnussen.
The lead eventually was wrested away by Magnussen, but the Chip Ganassi Racing driver, who was making his Rolex 24 debut, was forced to pit from first for a drive through penalty for wheel rotation while the car was jacked up during a pit stop.
Chase Elliott and Alexander Rossi, who share a primary sponsor (NAPA) in their other full-time auto racing gigs, talk in the pits before the Rolex 24 at Daytona (Jasen Vinlove/USA TODAY Sports).
Renger van der Zande, Magnussen’s Ganassi teammate, said the Acuras “found some speed overnight clearly, where yesterday I could get by them easily and drive away, that’s not there anymore.
“It’s so tight,” van der Zande said. “It’s so tight, man.
“We’re fighting for the lead in the race every time, and you make a small mistake, you lose a position. That’s how tight it is.
“There’s a lot of competitive cars who can do it at the end. We got lucky with the Bus Stop in traffic. Sometimes you’re stuck behind some GT or LMP3 car in the Bus Stop, and they just fly by you like sitting ducks. If that happens at the end of the race, man. That’s going to be the decision right there. The competition is high. Competition is big. Both, very competitive drivers, they know what to do, and I think also the teams, they run a very good program. it’s only seven cars, but all of them are doing very well.”
With four hours remaining in the season-opening sports car endurance classic, there were five DPi cars on the lead lap, led by Wayne Taylor Racing’s Filipe Albuquerque over Pagenaud in the No. 48 Cadillac.
Aside from the No. 31 being out of contention, the No. 5 Mustang Sampling Cadillac also was nearly 50 laps down after the car was damaged in an incident late Saturday night.
In other classes with four hours remaining, Corvette Racing held the top two spots in GTLM, the No. 18 of Era Motorsport was tops in LMP2, Riley Motorsports’ No. 74 led in LMP3, and the Winward Racing No. 57 Mercedes was first in GTD.
MOORESVILLE, N.C. – Inside this former textile mill, a retro building built in 1892 with massive floor-to-ceiling windows and sturdy brick, Toyota has planted a future seed with the GR Cup.
Once a hub for making cotton dye, the first floor has been turned into a factory that churned out spec sports cars for the past year as Toyota Racing Development prepares to launch its first single-make series.
The inaugural season of the Toyota Gazoo Racing GR Cup will begin this weekend at Sonoma Raceway, the first of seven SRO-sanctioned events (each with two races) featuring a field of homologated GR86 production models that have been modified for racing with stock engines.
Under the banner of its Gazoo Racing (a high-performance brand relatively new to North America but synonymous with Dakar Rally champion Nasser Al-Attiyah), Toyota will join Mazda, Porsche, Ferrari and Lamborghini as the latest automaker to run a single-make U.S. series (with Ford recently announcing plans for its own in the near future).
It’s grassroots-level amateur racing for manufacturers that are accustomed to racing at motorsports’ highest levels, but there are many benefits through competition, driver development and marketing despite the lower profile.
“It’s not the easiest thing or cheapest thing to do,” TRD executive commercial director Jack Irving told NBC Sports. “But there’s massive value to be a part of it and have our DNA in the cars. You get to race a bunch and get a bunch of data. You get to engage directly in feedback from the people beating those cars up.”
The GR86s being raced are very similar to the street versions that retail for about $35,000 at dealerships that annually sell several thousand.
“It’s a test of the car and your design,” Irving said. “We take an engineered vehicle designed to spec for the road and then apply our resources to make it race ready. Some of those things cross over.
The first floor of Toyota Racing Development’s Mooresville facility that finished the vehicles for the new GR Cup (Swikar Patel/TRD).
“Everyone approaches it differently. It’s a marketing piece for us. It’s a development piece for drivers. We’re supporting grass roots racing. This is a very long-term deal for us. This isn’t something we’re doing two years and done. It’s got a long-term vision. There’s big value in it, and there’s a lot of responsibility with that, too.
“You’re ultimately supporting it. You’re not just selling cars into a series and hoping it goes well. You have to be involved in a very material way to make sure it goes off well and has your fingerprints and represents the brand.”
Early indications have been solid. The GR Cup cars were rolled out on iRacing in January and immediately became one of the platform’s most popular vehicles (with 212-horsepower engines, the cars handle well and are difficult to spin).
TRD’s GR86 factory floor (Swikar Patel/TRD).
TRD has sold 33 cars for GR Cup with 31 racing in Sonoma, easily surpassing initial expectations.
“Our target was to sell 20 cars in the first year, and we could have sold 50 if not for supply chain issues with some vendors,” TRD president David Wilson told NBC Sports. “We basically came up with the idea of taking the GR86 and looking at what it would take to turn that into a little race car and do it affordably and competitively, and what’s come along with that is just a tremendous interest level. It seems like a market that perhaps has been underserved right now.”
The race cars start as production models that are shipped directly from the factory in Japan to a port in Charleston, South Carolina. After being trucked to the Mooresville facility, they are stripped and sent to Joe Gibbs Racing to be outfitted with a roll cage.
Upon return to TRD, the transmission and stock engine is added. The body remains virtually the same as the street version with a slightly altered hood, decklid and splitter for ride height and aerodynamics.
Jack Irving (Swikar Patel/TRD)
The cars mostly are customized to help manage the heat – the stock versions aren’t designed to handle the oil that sloshes around in the high-speed left- and right-hand turns on the road and street courses of the GR Cup schedule. TRD puts about two dozen parts on the cars, using Stratasys 3-D Printers to manufacture many on site (which allows flexibility for adjusting on the fly during R&D). In addition to help with cooling, many of the tweaks focus on allowing a limited number of setup changes.
“You don’t have a lot of ability to adjust these cars,” Irving said. “It was done on purpose. The intent was you have three spring sets, and you can adjust the shocks and do air pressure. That’s it. We seal the engine and components of it. We dyno everything. Everyone is within range to create as consistent a series as we can.
“Some of that is to mimic what Mazda did. They’ve done a really good job with their series. Porsche, Ferrari and other OEMs have done it very well. We had a learning that was easier to go through their book and see the Cliffs Notes version to get where we are.”
After taking delivery, GR Cup teams are responsible for transporting the cars to each track (and can buy up to three sets of Continental tires per event). Toyota brings two parts trucks to each track
THE SCHEDULE AND SCENE
After Sonoma, the GR Cup will visit Circuit of the Americas (May 5-7), Virginia International Raceway (June 16-18), the streets of Nashville (Aug. 4-6), Road America (Aug. 25-27), Sebring International Raceway (Sept. 22-24) and Indianapolis Motor Speedway (Oct. 6-8).
Though Nashville (IndyCar’s Music City Grand Prix) and Indy (SRO’s eight-hour Intercontinental Challenge) are part of weekends with bigger headliners, the GR Cup mostly will be the second-billed series (behind SRO’s Fanatech GT World Challenge) for events that will draw a few thousand. Sonoma had a crowd of about 4,000 last year, and SRO Motorsports America president Greg Gill said its events draw a maximum of about 13,000 over three days.
“There are some iconic venues, and the SRO it’s not IMSA,” Wilson said. “It’s got a different feel to it. It’s not the show. IMSA is kind of the show. I actually think it’s a good place for us to start, because it’s a little bit under the radar relatively speaking. It’s not a venue where you see the grandstands full of fans. It’s very much racers and their families. It’s got a neat vibe to it because it’s kind of small. So for our first effort as a single-make series, it’s the right place for us.”
The interior of the GR86 that will be raced in the GR Cup (Swikar Patel/TRD).
Though the attendance will be much smaller, Toyota still is bringing a large hospitality and marketing activation area with two 56-foot trucks that will provide a central gathering area for the series.
Teams’ entry fees will include meals there and provide a place to connect with Toyota engineers and other officials.
“I think we have a very different way of engaging with our group of drivers, and this series is similar to that,” Irving said. “Knowing that this isn’t going to get 100K people watching, but we want to have a direct connection with the drivers and understand their feelings about car, how do we make it better and empower them to be brand ambassadors for GR.”
BUDGETS, PURSES AND TEAMS
Toyota has positioned the GR Cup as filling a price gap between the Mazda MX-5 Cup (a spec Miata Series known for high-quality racing at very low costs) and the Porsche Carrera Cup
“If you look at the ladder of MX5 to Porsche Cup, the difference in cost is massive,” TRD general manager Tyler Gibbs told NBC Sports. “We slot in closer to Miata than Porsche. We’ll slot another car in potentially in the future above that. It’s a good place for us from a price point perspective. Our road car is slightly more expensive than a Miata, so it makes sense our performance on the car is higher than Miata.”
A GR Cup car will cost $125,000. Full-season costs will vary depending on how much teams spend on equipment and transportation with estimates from $15-35K per event. So a competitive full season probably could be accomplished in the $250,000-$300,000 range.
“The goal was if you can ‘Six Pack’ it like Kenny Rogers and throw it in the back of a trailer, that would be amazing for us,” said Irving, referencing a movie about being an independent racer in NASCAR. “That would make it more of what we hoped it would turn into, just being as accessible as we possibly can make it.”
Toyota has tried to bridge the gap by posting a purse of $1 million for the season. Each race pays $12,000 to win (through $5,000 for eighth) with the season champion earning $50,000.
“Our hope was if you won, the prize money would cover the cost of that weekend,” Gibbs said. “We’re not all the way there. But almost there.”
Toyota also has posted an additional $5,000 (on top of prize money) to the highest-finishing woman in every race (which dovetails with SRO’s 50 percent female-led executive team structure).
GR86 Manufacturing at GRG before the first 3 cars are picked up. —Swikar Patel/TRD
“If you’re a female driver who wins, you could get very close to sustainable” and cover a team’s race weekend costs, Irving said.
There are four women (Mia Lovell, Toni Breidinger, Cat Lauren and Isabella Robusto) slated for the full schedule.
The 31 cars will be fielded across more than a dozen teams including Smooge Racing (which fields GT4 Supras in SRO) and Copeland Motorsports (with Tyler Gonzalez, a four-time winner in MX-5 Cup). After a test last month at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval, teams began taking delivery on Feb. 24.
THE SANCTIONING BODY
Toyota fields Lexus in the GT categories of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship but elected to go with the SRO Motorsports Group (“SRO” stands for Stephane Ratel Organization; Ratel is the founder and CEO) as the sanctioning body for the GR Cup.
With a heavy focus on GT racing, SRO’s marquee events are 24-hour races at the Nurburgring in Germany and Spa in Belgium. In the United States, SRO primarily is focused on GT3 sprint racing, and Gill said it’s viewed as a “gateway to IMSA” and its endurance events.
In choosing SRO, Gibbs said “the schedule was a big part of it.” GR Cup races will be held almost exclusively on Saturday and Sunday mornings in a consistency that would have been difficult with IMSA (which runs a greater volume of bigger series).
“Our people can show up Friday, race Saturday and Sunday and be on the way home Sunday afternoon,” Gibbs said. “For our customer for this car, that was important. They still have jobs and particularly the younger drivers have to go to school. The SRO really fit us. They were very interested.”
Irving also was drawn to SRO’s flexibility with digital media right and free livestreams of races that Toyota can use on its platforms.
The SR86 in testing at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval (TRD).
Said Irving: “It’s hard to get a schedule that made sense and having a break between races so an amateur can repair their cars and have a month to regroup was a big deal. The long-term vision of SRO was a big part of that. IMSA runs a lot of classes. How we fit in was difficult. Would they have done things to make it work, yeah. But they just didn’t work for the vision we were doing. This is its own thing for us.”
Gill said the SRO is focused on “customer racing” that balances individual interests against factory programs – while still putting an emphasis on the importance of manufacturers such as Toyota.
“We were very impressed with the development of sports car racing at Toyota and what they wanted to do for the brand and the very strategic way they looked at things,” Gill told NBC Sports. “We had enjoyed real success and had a lot of admiration for the programs that Honda and Mazda developed with sports car racing at the grass roots and entry level. We thought they’d done an excellent job. Toyota has taken it to another level and should be commended because it’s good for the entire industry.”
GAZOO RACING AND THE FUTURE
Irving said Toyota has set a goal of turning Gazoo Racing into the premier performance brand in the United States within a decade, and the GR Cup is part of that thrust.
Gazoo Racing is the baby of Toyota Motor Corp. president Akio Toyoda, who founded a separate company called “Garage Racing” while racing under a pseudonym for many years.
Toyoda, who eventually would race a Lexus LFA at Nurburgring, eventually transitioned the program into Gazoo Racing (Gazoo translates to photographs in Japanese; Toyoda often took pictures of vehicles he wanted to build and race) as he rose through the ranks of Toyota.
“The concept of the brand is we’re going to build cars that are fun to drive, not just for accountants,” Gibbs said.
Irving said the intent of GR is “the car is born on track and not the boardroom.” In order to be certified by Toyota for Gazoo Racing, the GR86 had to decrease its lap time by a certain percentage over its street model.
In the long-term, Irving said Toyota could work with another series to adapt the GR86 to endurance races. But in the short-term, there are plans to roll out a “dealer class,” possibly by its COTA round in May.
“That’s our version of a softball league with dealership principals who purchase cars and race against each other,” Wilson said with a laugh. “As competitive as dealers are, we’ll sell a lot of spare parts. It becomes a way to generate competition amongst our dealer body, and we’re going to have some fun with it.”
Toyota Racing Development’s fleet of GR86s shortly before GR Cup teams began taking delivery (Swikar Patel/TRD).
