Circuit of the Americas, which offered its most ambitious schedule this year, will lose a racing weekend for 2018 with the

IMSA WeatherTech sports car series veering away from Austin.



Instead, IMSA and the Continental Tire Challenge will stop at the Mid-Ohio road course in Lexington for the weekend of May

4-6. The IMSA series spent the first weekend of this May at COTA, where it had been a regular,

with brothers Ricky and Jordan Taylor dominating the Advance Auto Parts showdown.



COTA management told the American-Statesman that scheduling was the biggest issue.

"We collectively just couldn’t make it work for 2018," chairman Bobby Epstein said Friday. "There’s not much else to it."

Katja Heim, the track’s chief operating officer, said, "this was a mutual decision between COTA and IMSA."

IMSA races are not big money makers for the track, falling well below Formula One and MotoGP. Circuit of the Americas did

not release attendance figures for this year’s IMSA weekend. There appeared to be fewer than 20,000 at Saturday’s main event.



Some drivers expressed disappointment to the Statesman that the May 6 races were held in daytime heat. COTA had a conflict

that night with the large JMBLYA music festival.



IMSA races bring a high level of prestige to the track with most of the world’s premier car manufacturers in the house, including

Mercedes, Porsche, Ferrari, Aston Martin and Lamborghini. They also account for thousands of industry executives and employees

spending time and money in Austin.



This was the first year at COTA that the IMSA and World Endurance Championship

were split into separate weekends. The

Lone Star LeMans will be Sept. 15-16. COTA’s next event is the Pirelli World Challenge on Labor Day weekend (Sept. 2-3).



IMSA president Scott Atherton said he’ll be glad to be back at Mid-Ohio for the first time since 2013.

"Mid-Ohio has a long and storied history of hosting world-class sports car races in front of a loyal and knowledgeable fanbase,"



he told Racer.com. "Many of our stakeholders have long been supportive and quite vocal regarding a return to Mid-Ohio and we are pleased that

we can finally say ‘We’re back.'"



He indicated he will work with COTA on a 2019 return to Austin.

Circuit of the Americas has nine race weekends in ’17, two more than the previous high for the five-year-old track.