With the 2024 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship well underway and plans already being drawn up for the 2025 season by key players in each class, HRC USA finds itself with important decisions to make as Year 3 of GTP edges closer.
Heading into the 2024 campaign – which saw its GTP effort move to a two-car solution with WTRAndretti and the new-look HRC USA organisation take over from HPD – things looked to have stabilised for the ARX-06 programme in the short to medium term.
However, movements behind the scenes, sparked by Cadillac’s decision to cut ties with Ganassi at the end of the current season, appears to have left HRC needing a new partner for its factory programme for 2025 onwards.
This is because, as first reported by RACER.com last week, it is now likely that WTRAndretti is going to make a move to Cadillac with a two-car V-Series.R effort and race alongside Action Express in IMSA next year.
“It’s unclear if the deal has reached the point of a wedding ceremony, but at a minimum, engagement rings have been exchanged,” Marshall Pruett wrote.
“Together, with Andretti’s recent alliance with Cadillac and Taylor’s longstanding relationships with GM, the upcoming union was an easy one to predict.
“Andretti Cadillac in F1. Wayne Taylor Racing/Andretti Cadillac in IMSA. It makes too much sense to be untrue.”
WTRA was immediately believed to be in the fold at Cadillac in the fallout of the Ganassi news, which broke ahead of the Sebring 12 Hours. A senior source close to the matter in the IMSA paddock told DSC after Sebring they were “certain” that “Andretti had something”. But at that time it wasn’t clear whether or not it was a deal to compete in IMSA or the WEC, as a left field move from Hendrick Motorsports was also mentioned to DSC as a potential solution for North America once a second Action Express entry was ruled out.
Now though, it appears that IMSA is the chosen route for Cadillac and Andretti, with the selection process for a new WEC service provider believed to be in its final stages too.
HRC therefore looks set to race in 2025 with another new-look programme. While Ganassi is understood to have been in the mix, Meyer Shank Racing appears poised for a surprise return according to both RACER and multiple sources on DSC’s side.
Interestingly, this all comes at a time when both Acura and Cadillac have chosen to adopt the same ‘wait and see’ approach to upgrades, unlike Porsche, which has been pushing for a significant reliability-focused update to the 963’s crankshaft that is likely to be introduced after Le Mans. Lamborghini Iron Lynx has also told DSC that it will introduce a series of minor updates to the SC63 throughout the 2024 season.
Whether the change in teams for both factories has been a factor in their decision to hold off on ‘Joker’ updates is unclear.
Nevertheless, David Salters, the president of HRC USA, is content with the ARX-06 in its current form. And he feels the key players in the marketplace should be taking a cautious approach to this area of the LMDh-LMH convergence era, to prevent costs spiralling out of control.
“We put a huge effort into Year 1, like with any new car,” he told DSC in Sebring. “We put the effort into the design gestation phase at the start, especially as it was a change of ruleset. It keeps you awake at night, and we weren’t conservative, but we pushed hard and ORECA did a brilliant job as they have the same mentality.
“It’s a really different challenge, but it is a good one,” he added when asked for his opinion on LMDh ruleset after more than a year of competition. “We’ve got hybrid engineers, powertrain engineers, vehicle dynamics and performance engineers and it’s much more analytical. From that sense it’s a something we relish. That’s why Honda does it, to develop people and technology and at the right level, as its not silly expensive. It’s more expensive than we thought, but it’s not silly silly expensive.
“Originally the discussion was that we wouldn’t upgrade (in LMDh), but there are ‘Jokers’ allowed now. BoP is there to give a safety net, and you’ve got to keep costs under control or people will leave. We need to do that. It’s a bit more expensive than we’d imagined, but everything is.”
Customer cars is also a hot-button topic in the formula, which DSC also discussed with Salters. Could we see more than two ARX-06s racing in the future?
“We will investigate it (whether or not you can recoup R&D costs with customer cars),” he said. “You’d like to see more cars racing and if we can balance the books a bit better…
“We are thinking about it.”
And what about seeing the ARX-06 in the FIA WEC with a Honda badge? This was something origionally brought up when the announcement was made last year that HPD would become HRC USA as part of a move by Honda to merge its two independent racing arms. Again, this is a prospect being monitored, but not currently acted upon by HRC. Little has changed since HRC USA was born.
“First you’ve got to balance LMH and LMDh, which seems to be happening,” Salters said when asked if it was viable for Honda to enter the FIA WEC. “It’s not easy, but the signs are there. You have to make sure you can compete, then it has to make business and budgetry sense to Honda. Sometimes they line up, sometimes they don’t. If in the future they could, we could be interested.
“There is already a rude reality of priorities in the company, and you’d imagine that at the moment F1 is pretty high priority. We already do global motorsport at the highest level and we sort of dominate!”
As always the words of experienced senior executives need to be considered carefully. It is clear there is work to be done on both the regulatory and commercial fronts before serious contemplation of a WEC Hypercar effort by Honda can legitimately be reported as a realistic prospect.
