When the checkered flag fell on the Petit Le Mans’ 10-hour endurance race at Road Atlanta, and consequently on the 2017 season of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, series officials likely let out a collective sigh: Finally, a year where a lot of important things went right, and more significantly, nothing major went wrong.
It was a year of close, …
Cannot wait for Daytona. The prototype category is going to be really interesting with Mazda returning and Penske joining.
" And for many of the manufacturers, that cost is partly offset by the business of selling customer cars for the GT Daytona class, a big business for, in particular, Porsche, Audi, Mercedes, Ferrari and Lamborghini." Yes the Corvette is in GTLM, but for me, to have Cadillac jettison the ATS-Vr program (yes different series) makes little or no sense from a marketing/selling product stand point(yeah corporate has it all figured out). Will DPi caddys be available at a location near you????
Let's be honest though. They get more visibility for the Cadillac brand from IMSA than they ever would from PWC. 3-4 X the TV viewers and more fans in the stands.
At least with IMSA, it's not the creation of a completely different car for 1 team to promote a car that sells 25K units for all of the variations (Plain Jane 2.0T to ATS-V) on a good year with this year looking more like 14K for the entire line. What was the V take rate of that? Maybe 3-5%? I've never seen one in the wild outside of areas of a cadillac sponsered event.
They never did a customer program in the US as the Corvette was the only customer car they ever sold and that was really rare until this year.
All said, I give Caddy credit for staying in PWC for as long as they did.
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