IMSA’s WeatherTech series is going great, but where does it go next?
Enlarge / DPi and LMP2 cars lead the grid at the start of the 2018 Sahlens Six Hours of the Glen at Watkins Glen in upstate New York. (credit: Brian Cleary/Getty Images)
You don't have to follow sports car racing for too long before noticing its a rather cyclical sport. For a few years, everything will be totally awesome with cool cars and great racing. Then it all goes wrong; a bad economy sucks racing budgets dry, a rules change sends competitors elsewhere, or one of any number of other problems arises and interest and excitement evaporate. CanAm, Group C, GTP, and the American Le Mans Series (ALMS) each blossomed for a while before circumstances conspired against them. We saw it most recently with the World Endurance Championship. For a few brief years it was the best thing in racing, with 1,000hp hybrid prototypes from Audi, Porsche, and Toyota-now in 2018 it's a mere shadow of where things were just two seasons ago.
Meanwhile, here in the US, IMSA's WeatherTech Sportscar Championship appears to be in rude health, attracting a healthy mix of factory-backed cars in the DPi and GTLM class as well as pro-am teams running DPi, LMP2, and GTD cars. We've checked in with the IMSA series a couple of times this year-at the season opening Rolex 24 as well as at the Detroit Grand Prix-and we took a look behind the scenes with Mazda and Multimatic. But at Watkins Glen earlier this summer, I caught up with IMSA's president, Scott Atherton, to talk about where American sports car racing is headed.
Atherton has been involved in the sport for several decades, running several different racetracks before heading up the ALMS in 2000. The ALMS' heyday was probably in the late 2000s, but by 2012 it was in a bit of trouble. The France family, which owns NASCAR, stepped in to buy it, and merged the ALMS with its GrandAm series (which always put on a great show but struggled to attract the fans, mainly due to its low-tech and rather ugly Daytona Prototype cars). I put it to Atherton that his series is now very reminiscent of ALMS' glory days.
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