What Trans Am Is Like Today

A Strong Heritage

Officially known as the Trans Am Series presented by Pirelli in honor of the spec tire, this racing throwback is a cost-effective alternative to the ultra-expensive, factory-built cars marketed through customer racing programs in IMSA, World Challenge America, and one-make series such as Ferrari Challenge and the Porsche 911 GT3 Cup. Featuring tube-frame chassis, silhouette bodies that mimic street cars, and honking American pushrod V8s, Trans Am thoroughbreds can match the lap times turned by GT3, GT4 and TCR cars at a fraction of the cost.

“In terms of bang for the buck, you can’t beat it,” says Lawrence Loshak, a Trans Am race winner who’s earned SCCA national championships in production cars, formula cars and sports racers. “The cars are crazy fast. We’re approaching 190 mph at most tracks and 200 mph at Daytona. Sometimes we have to start braking before the first brake marker! It baffles me that the series isn’t two, three, four times larger than it is. But I think it’s on the brink of getting back to where it was in its heyday.”

Make that heydays. Trans Am is America’s longest-lived road racing series. But since its inception in 1966, it’s been through more ups and downs than a helicopter doing air taxi duty.

Photography Courtesy Ford

At the first race of what was then known as the Trans American Sedan Series, at Sebring, the winner was future Formula 1 world champion Jochen Rindt, with Over 2.0-Liter class honors going to Bob Tullius of Group 44 fame. But the series quickly became synonymous with factory-backed pony cars–Mustangs, Camaros, Barracudas, Javelins and so on–driven by heroes such as Parnelli Jones and Mark Donohue. There was also a 2.5-liter championship, famously won by John Morton in a funky BRE Datsun 510.

This is generally thought of as the golden age of Trans Am. But the fuel crisis of 1973 killed the pony car craze, and when the manufacturers bailed, the wheels came off the series. In 1980, in an effort to attract some new blood, Trans Am shifted from production-based cars to tube-frame chassis with fiberglass bodies that resembled–very vaguely, in some cases–vehicles sold on showroom floors.

Photograph Courtesy Ford

There were some stellar years during the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, with headliners like Willy T. Ribbs, David Hobbs, Scott Pruett, Lyn St. James, Hurley Haywood and, most successful of all, Tommy Kendall. But it tended to be feast or famine, depending on the participation–or lack thereof–of car manufacturers, which periodically sunk a bunch of money into the series and dramatically raised its profile.

“We’ve had a lot of manufacturer involvement over the years, and it’s nice to have all those resources and see all the win ads,” says series President and CEO John Clagett, who’s been with Trans Am on and off for the past 35 years. “But by and large, factories come, and factories go whenever they’ve accomplished their goals.”

Photograph Courtesy Ford

And Looking Forward

By 2006, the factories had disappeared from the scene, and so had most of the competitors. The entire schedule consisted of two races, both of them run at Heartland Park in Topeka, Kansas. At the end of the “season,” the series was euthanized.

But interest in ground-pounding V8-powered door-slammers never went away. And big-bore GT1 cars, most wearing Corvette bodywork, remained a perennial fave in SCCA club racing. So in 2009, SCCA Pro Racing revived the Trans Am series, based on GT1 rules.

The initial response was tepid. But the series developed traction in 2011, when longtime Trans Am driver and team owner Jim Derhaag put together a new management team under the Trans Am Race Company banner. “The concept was to go to historic and heritage-type venues and put together a rules package that, number one, was cost efficient, and two, wasn’t going to change on a continual basis,” Clagett says.

With SCCA Pro Racing continuing to sanction races and provide operational support, the series has grown steadily.

Photography Credit: Chris Clark

Trans Am now features four classes. The bottom two, known as SGT and GT, are catchall categories for everything from Viper ACRs and Lamborghini LP 570-4 Super Trofeo cars to limited-prep home builds that slot into the correct performance window. As Trans Am Technical Director Aaron Coalwell says, “We try very hard to fit your car in.”

You can think of the second-tier class, TA2 presented by AEM, as Spec Miata meets NASCAR, with a semi-spec rules package designed to promote close competition while holding the line on cost. Tube-frame cars must be bought from one of three approved chassis builders, and seven approved engine builders provide sealed motors for the appropriate bodywork: a 376-cubic-inch LS3 for a Chevrolet Camaro, a 368-cubic-inch Windsor for a Ford Mustang, and a 392-cubic-inch Hemi for a Dodge Challenger. (Power is equalized by a less expensive version of the LS3, badged as the TA2 Choice Engine, that can be used in any car.)

Turnkey cars are available for as little as $111,000, which is a steal by pro racing standards. With nearly 500 horsepower motivating 2830 pounds, a TA2 car will obliterate a significantly more expensive TCR machine and lap as quickly as a GT4 costing twice as much. Admittedly, sophistication isn’t the class’s strong suit. Conceptually, TA2 entries are stock cars modified for road racing, and they feature last-gen components such as live axles, H-pattern shifters and 15-inch steel wheels.

“People think that the car is going to be a wild animal and you’ve got to climb into a ring with a lion to drive the car,” says Joe Stevens, owner of Stevens-Miller Racing, which runs five arrive-and-drive cars in the TA2 class. “But it does everything a race car is supposed to do. Another great thing about the class is the depth of the fields. No matter where you start, you’re going to be racing door to door with somebody for 100 miles.”

TA2 has caught fire, routinely drawing 25-car fields. That's large enough to justify a standalone run group. (The other three classes compete in a second run group.) The class has also become a popular destination for drivers looking to make a career out of racing. It’s no coincidence that more than a dozen young guns with NASCAR development contracts have sampled TA2, most notably Justin Haley, who went on to score a win in the Coke Zero Sugar 400 Monster Energy Cup race at Daytona earlier this year.

Photography Credit: Chris Clark

But even though TA2 is growing faster as a class, TA remains the king of the hill because the rules are much more open. With a wheelbase of 102 inches, the tube-frame chassis are designed and scratch-built specifically for road racing, so they brake and corner far better than the TA2s. They also pack a much bigger wallop thanks to a carbureted, fire-breathing 6.0-liter V8. (Loshak likes to say that the cars “have America coming out the exhaust.”) Many of them are ex-NASCAR engines overbored from 358 to 366 cubic inches, and they’re good for as much as 850 horsepower and 550 lb.-ft. of torque.

“The TA car is absolutely nuts to drive,” says reigning TA champ Ernie Francis Jr., a 21-year-old tyro who graduated to Trans Am after stints in karting and Spec Miata. “It has so much horsepower that it never stops pulling, but you have such big tires that you can really roll a lot of speed through the turns.” As for the lack of antilock brakes or traction control, he says, “In a TA car, you are the traction control.”

Telemetry is prohibited, and the only permissible driver aid is a sequential gearbox with auto blip on downshift and shift-without-lift capability. But you get a weight break for running an H-pattern ’box, which is the weapon of choice of past champions Boris Said, Amy Ruman and Simon Gregg. You can also save additional weight by forgoing tunnels in the undertray, thereby reducing aerodynamic grip.

“The GT3 cars look great, and they have a lot of downforce, which makes them fast around the track. But they’re real vanilla compared to the TA cars,” Said says. “You have to be a butcher to drive a GT3 car fast. There’s no finesse at all. You need a tenth of the skill you use in Trans Am.”

That’s exactly what attracted Chris Dyson to the series. Best known for his exploits in prototypes and GT3 cars, Dyson formed a Trans Am team to complement his oval track program of midgets, sprint cars and Silver Crown cars.

Photography Credit: Chris Clark

“Trans Am makes more traditional requests of the driver,” he says. “It’s old school in the way it rewards the artistry of driving. You’ve got to drive the cars with a special type of discipline because of the lack of driver aids. And because of the rules package, there’s not a lot of obsolescence. The cars retain good residual value on the club market.”

The value proposition remains one of Trans Am’s most appealing features, especially when you consider how much cheaper it is to repair a tube-frame chassis than to replace a crash-damaged tub. Which raises the question: If the costs are so modest (relatively), the cars are so much fun to drive, and the racing is so competitive, why isn’t Trans Am a bigger deal?

A couple of reasons: For starters, manufacturers aren’t eager to invest in a series offering no obvious relationship to their street cars or opportunity to generate revenue for their customer racing programs. Also, the 100-mile sprint race format means you can’t pair an amateur with a pro, which is a common practice in endurance racing. So if you’re slow, you can’t count on pit strategy or a paid co-driver to prevent you from finishing DFL.

Still, as Loshak says, “I would guess 99% of the racers in the country would like to drive a TA car if they could.” If they start voting with their feet, we just might see road racing muscle cars on center stage again, back where they belong.