Raging into the darkness, brake discs aglow in red, exhausts firing blue flames rearward as the hands of the clock spin past midnight and keep rotating through another 12 hours until 24 hours of endurance racing cruelty is complete.
Weeks before NASCAR fans flock to Daytona Beach for its storied 500-mile oval contest, the International Motor Sports Association (IMSA), holds its annual celebration of heartbreak and glory for two straight days at the Rolex 24 At Daytona. It’s one of one, a major event unlike anything else on the U.S. sporting landscape — held this weekend, to be precise — and it’s on the rise.
IMSA’s festival of fatigue is run on the speedway’s “roval” configuration, which utilizes some of the big oval’s stock car corners and a road course built into the infield that combines for an seemingly unending lap that spans 3.56 miles. Carefully crafted teams of drivers fight to take the lead — and to remain lucid from the waving of the green flag on Saturday at 1:40 p.m. ET to the checkered at 1:40 p.m. on Sunday — using exotic sports cars that are punished without pause, all for our entertainment.
The series debuted its high-tech hybrid Grand Touring Prototypes (GTP) last year, and thanks to the newfound interest surrounding GTP, IMSA received an appreciable increase in attendance and its television audience. Possibly the greatest co-sign for IMSA’s surging popularity has been within the auto industry as 18 car manufacturers have aligned themselves with the series to race and promote themselves in front of those who tend to know the cylinder counts and cubic capacities of each motor in action.
The unabashed positivity continues in that area with Ford’s return to IMSA, with its new factory-run Mustang GT3s, where it has age-old in-state rival General Motors bringing its new Corvette Z06 GT3 to wage a head-to-head battle in the series’ GTD Pro class. Splitting the auto titans is the boutique British manufacturer McLaren, the car-making arm of the legendary Formula One team, which has entered the scrum with its 720S GT3 supercar.
If 2023 was the year of IMSA GTP, 2024 is presenting its fans with an unheralded array of GT machinery to love as the scrap among Chevrolet, Ford and McLaren also…
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