Michael Shank Racing Ligier JS P2-Honda team owner Michael Shank, Action Express Racing Corvette DP team principal Gary Nelson, VisitFlorida.com Racing Corvette DP team owner Troy Flis, and Wayne Racing Corvette DP team owner Wayne Taylor spoke with Marshall Pruett about some of the topics discussed in his 3-part opinion piece regarding the future of the TUDOR Championship’s Prototype class. Here are their insights and opinions on the issues facing IMSA and its teams:

PRUETT: Should IMSA base its future Prototype rules around a Le Mans-compliant P2 car?

SHANK: Where they’re headed in 2017 in a lot of ways makes financial sense, and I completely understand why they are doing it. However, that being said, it’s not what our series wants in America. In America, we want to be the number one series and we want to have manufacturer involvement. And I know for a fact there are several manufacturers that want to do it already. But it doesn’t require a car you can take to Le Mans.

In the beginning of this 2017 process, the idea that I go race with the WEC at Mount Fuji and then do a TUDOR race the next weekend…I loved that. That’s the old 1980s, 1990s world endurance deal. But it just hasn’t worked out that way.

There’s no question in my mind IMSA needs to just build its foundation properly with America as the priority and get the car numbers up, make sure teams can afford to do full seasons here, and find corporate partners that can provide proper prize money. I had no idea they would submit us to the Le Mans scenario.

TAYLOR: (seen below with Oreca’s Hugues de Chaunac) Listen, I love Le Mans. I drove there 13 times. I was lucky I won my class there. My son just won it. I have been there 17 years in a row and it will always be the best, biggest sports car event in the world. But we’ve got Daytona here and our own races.

For me, I struggle to understand who would want this in IMSA. If all the teams have said, “Hey, we want to do that,” that’s one thing, but nobody’s asked me.

I think that IMSA has done some good stuff now; they’ve made some good changes. I think the P2 rules, if they adopt what we want, that’s going to be great. But I think Le Mans should not be even discussed anymore. It’s a complete and utter waste of everybody’s time. I don’t understand why this conversation is going on.

FLIS: We’re a DP team – all were pretty much able to get an invite for this year. If we wanted to go with one of their cars, I could’ve gotten an invite, to tell you the truth. I don’t think it was that big of a deal. It becomes, do you want to pay the money and go, and if you do, you lease a car and go.

I really want IMSA to focus on North America, because that’s where we are at and that’s where we race. We do business a little bit differently here. Even if we do have cars that can race there, it’s still going to be hard to take our car and go to Le Mans because you might be changing the body, you might be changing the motor to win. All these things that we do here aren’t going to relate to over there.

We’re still going to have to pretty much lease a car, or when we go with our car it’s going to be something we really don’t know, we really don’t race that much.

You think about the life of a Daytona Prototype, and it’s been really a pretty strong car for the last 10 years, whatever it’s been. It’s like, “Listen, why don’t we just do that again with what’s best for us?” Maybe it’s based on a P2 chassis or P3 chassis, even. Something where we can still bring the budget back to reality. I am hoping that they make the right decision, and time will tell.

How important is maintaining direct relationships with auto manufacturers, and using with their various engines and custom bodywork solutions?

TAYLOR: I will only be in prototypes if I have a relationship with the car manufacturer. Without that I see absolutely no interest whatsoever to continue on in prototypes. If we have them, I can tell you I’d definitely be on the TUDOR grid in 2017, and possibly with two cars.

If you see Corvette and you see BMW and a Porsche and an Audi and whatever brands involved with a P2 engine, with stylized bodies, then you’ve got manufacturers racing, wanting the best of the best. Create a box and as long as you design your car that fits inside that box and you stylize it to whatever you think is going to be the best for whatever manufacturer you are talking to, I think it has great potential. To be honest, I think if they do that, it will attract the Europeans to come over here. I actually do.

FLIS: I think the more we can get manufacturer help and the more we can get that whole spread of being able to have a car for five or 10 years again is what really keeps this sport alive. I think it gives everybody the opportunity to come run cars with some identity, a brand name they recognize, and we’d get a bigger car count. That would be a pretty cool deal to have.

If you were allowed, would you take your 2017 car and race it at Le Mans?

NELSON: Personally, I place a higher value on winning overall at any of the IMSA events held in North America than I do the chance of a class win in Le Mans, several laps down to the overall winner.

TAYLOR: I don’t have any interest in going with my own car, unless you can win overall. I see less than zero chance of having interest. It’s hard enough to keep a car running financially in this series, much less find another million dollars to do one race at Le Mans. Unless someone wants to pay for me to go, there’s no chance.

FLIS: We have a great partner with Visit Florida. I know they would love to go to Le Mans again. They went over and sponsored a car a few years ago and it worked out well for them and they have given us interest that they do want to go back. As for me personally, I don’t know.

Another thing that concerns me is that we’ve put too much emphasis on going to Le Mans. Going to Le Mans would be surely on my bucket list to do and I would love to do it, but is it the end of the world? No. And like I said before, using a P2 car from Europe to do it makes the most sense as I see things.

SHANK: For a team like mine, I don’t have tremendous desire to do the WEC, although I respect it. I bought a car that’s going to race best in America. That’s my main priority when we get to this new rules package. So for me, I will be a North American team, but I want to go to Le Mans once in a while when the stars align. I want to make sure that we can still do that, but then we have to focus on our own championship.

We want to have styling cues that make sense here, but they don’t fit the aero box for ACO. When it comes time to get my entry ready for Le Mans, I’ll be all set next year with a car that fits the model. But if I’m looking down the road, there’s a million options – and it doesn’t necessarily have to come down to owning a car here that fits what the ACO is looking for. I can pick up the phone and make a [Le Mans compliant] car happen pretty quickly.

Should IMSA grandfather current P2s and DPs for an extended period, more than just one year, when 2017 arrives?

TAYLOR: I think they probably should do that because at least in the first year they might be short on numbers. I certainly think that there’s a lot of guys that have a lot of money invested, so give them at least an opportunity, another chance, to keep running what they’ve got if that’s their preference.

NELSON: My early experience watching the Ligier when it showed up at COTA was thinking that car was going to be hard to beat. And now with the P2 car they’re discussing, as long as we have a chance, we need to go after it. It might be easier for the officials not to have too many things to balance because of the complexity of that.

As the first Prototype owner to make the switch, Michael Shank estimates the cost to convert his team from a DP to a current P2 coupe, pay for the engine lease, acquire all the spares, and buy or build the various items needed to run the car, was between $750,000 and $850,000. As someone running a DP, is that’s a staggering sum to find, and how do you pay for the switch to P2s in 2017?

FLIS: If everybody’s going down this road and the car is going to be a homologated car for at least five years, then we can make the effort. You can put the money into the car and know that it’s going to be there for five years, and hopefully longer than that. You can spread your money out wisely over that span to cover the costs.

NELSON: The number one thing we have in any series is car owners that can afford to compete. So that’s got to be a pretty big priority with the decision-makers on their list. They’ll want to put the cost figure where owners can afford what they need to buy.

TAYLOR: What about the fact that we bought DPs then we had to pay to change to go to a second-generation, then we had to pay to go to a third generation? The [2014] conversion cost me $800,000, so I’ve already spent that amount on a DP in the last 18 months. But the point is that in 2017, these DPs need to be replaced anyway.

What we can’t afford, in any way, is to go to new cars and keep having these big upgrade costs every couple of years. If these new cars are left alone after we pay for them, at least I can see a way to put most of a budget together. But if I have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars over and over again on the same car, there’s no way. Let us buy cars and keep the changes to the bare minimum.

At the end of the day, I just hope that we have the manufacturer support and some cost caps in position so team owners like me can afford to buy a car and keep going.

Budgets have gotten out of control a little bit at the moment, and so you’re always worried when a big expense like new cars will hit everyone. If we can keep growing the series, then the budgets will come back to us. It’s not there yet and it still needs a way to go, but I think in the future if we can get the manufacturers to get involved and do the branding that they need, there’s a great opportunity and we can make the budgets work.

Marshall Pruett