The IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship has their first sprint race of 2023 Saturday afternoon on the streets of Long Beach, Calif. 28 teams in three classes will race for 100 minutes on the treacherous 1.968-mile street course. The LMP2 teams will return next month at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, while LMP3 teams will return at Watkins Glen in June.
In the GTP class, eight teams will do battle Saturday. There are no new teams that did not compete in Sebring, nor any teams that raced in Sebring that are skipping the weekend.
As a result, there will be two Cadillac V-Series.Rs, two Acura ARX-06s, two BMW M Hybrid V8s and two Porsche 963s that will take each other on. In the DPi era, Long Beach favored naturally aspirated cars. That meant the Cadillac DPi-V.R.
Cadillac won all five races at Long Beach in the DPi era. GM-powered cars have won the last seven races at Long Beach with Corvette DPs winning in 2015 and 2016. The only time that a turbocharged car has won at Long Beach overall since the ALMS-Grand-Am merger was when Chip Ganassi Racing’s Scott Pruett and Memo Rojas won in 2014 with their Ford EcoBoost-powered Riley DPG3.
The GTD Pro class has only five entries, down from eight at Sebring. One of those teams that competed at Sebring, Turner Motorsport, has moved what was their No. 95 entry to the GTD class as part of an unusual situation in which the car will compete in GTD Pro for the Michelin Endurance Cup races only.
The additional teams that are not entered from Sebring are Iron Lynx’s No. 63 Lamborghini, which is confirmed for the Michelin Endurance Cup races only, and Risi Competizione’s Ferrari. The Risi team has a platinum team license that could allow them to compete full-time, but the team has largely cherry-picked races in recent years.
The other five teams (Corvette Racing, WeatherTech Racing, Pfaff Motorsports, VasserSullivan’s No. 14 and The Heart of Racing’s No. 23) have no driver changes. They are running their full-time driving pairings.
The GTD class has 15 teams entered, down from 20 at Sebring. Teams that are not entered include AF Corse, Cetilar Racing and Triarsi Competizione, all Ferrari teams teams that are endurance only. They are joined by Magnus Racing, Iron Lynx’s Iron Dames team and Wright Motorsports’ No. 16.
The No. 16 Porsche was originally going to be full-time before the air restrictor rules for the new 992-based Porsche 911 GT3 R rendered the car uncompetitive…
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