Meyer Shank Racing is returning to the US sports car championship IMSA after a one-year break and will again field LMDh racing cars from Acura from 2025. MSR and HRC (Honda Racing Corporation) officially announced the multi-year deal this Thursday.
Meyer Shank Racing will field two Acura ARX-06s at the 24 Hours of Daytona starting with the season opener in January 2025, with one of the two vehicles to be primarily looked after by Honda personnel. Daytona, there was something… At the IMSA season opener in 2023, MSR won the famous 24-hour race on the LMDh-Acura’s racing debut, but was subsequently convicted of competition fraud.
Honda, of all people, uncovered the Daytona fraud
The team was found to have manipulated the tire pressures. Meyer Shank Racing was allowed to keep the victory – as is usual in the USA – but received a flood of penalties: loss of 200 team and driver points in the IMSA ranking, loss of all team and driver points in the Michelin Endurance Cup, loss of race prize money, a $50,000 fine, as well as a temporary (team owner Mike Shank) and a full (team engineer Ryan McCarthy) suspension.
A crucial factor in this scandalous case: vehicle partner Honda, under the still-acting motorsport boss David Salters, had uncovered the fraud and reported it to IMSA after a thorough analysis. MSR was allowed to compete with the Acura in the top GTP class (analogous to the WEC Hypercar class) for the rest of the season, but the two parties then separated. Meanwhile, the partnership continued in the IndyCar series.
Wayne Taylor Racing to switch to Cadillac from IMSA
The Daytona scandal has now apparently been ‘forgotten’, and so Meyer Shank Racing will return to IMSA in 2025 with Honda and its US subsidiary Acura. On the other hand, it is time to call it a day for the Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti team, which had taken over the use of the two LMDh Acuras and is currently in fourth (Jordan Taylor/Louis Deletraz) and sixth (Ricky Taylor/Filipe Albuquerque) place in the team rankings. Penske-Porsche leads the rankings with Felipe Nasr/Dane Cameron after their recent victory in Watkins Glen.
Wayne Taylor Racing, meanwhile, is set to switch to Cadillac after the US carmaker and Chip Ganassi Racing parted ways. “We have had a successful collaboration with HRC and Acura over the past four years,” said team owner Wayne Taylor. “When it came to extending our contract, we listened carefully and seriously considered their future plans, but ultimately felt that we needed to take a different path in the future.”
The Daytona fraud will not be forgotten by the public any time soon, but with MSR and Acura, two parties have found each other again who can look back on numerous successes in the IMSA: Meyer Shank Racing won the 2019, 2020 and 2022 championships with an Acura-DPi (LMDh predecessor). In 2012, 2022 and 2023, the team won the season highlight, the 24 Hours of Daytona. Successes at the endurance classics Petit Le Mans (2016, 2022) and Watkins Glen (2017, 2019) round off the winning streak.