IMSA president John Doonan says the decision to make the 2026 WeatherTech SportsCar Championship race in Road America an Endurance Cup round keeps the calendar fresh and generates “excitement” for fans and competitors alike.
Next season the race at Elkhart Lake will become a six-hour encounter, while the round at Indianapolis Motor Speedway will shift back to being a two-hour, 40-minute sprint after a two-year stint on the Endurance schedule.
It was the big headline of today’s calendar announcement, and according to Doonan, the move to take IMSA Endurance Cup racing back to the midwest of America has been 18 months in the making.
“It’s no secret I spent a lot of time growing up at Road America,” he told reporters today in Sebring. “It’s a personal passion and what Road America has done is provide a fan experience.
“Summertime in the midwest is so beautiful, as is March here, or January in Daytona Beach or Sebring. We want to follow the weather patterns in everything we do.
“We were talking to Mike Kertscher (the president of Road America) and his entire team for the last 18 months to two years and said at some point we’d like to bring an endurance round to the facility. It shows tremendous flexibility from our promotor partners to shuffle it up a little bit.
“Road America, amongst so many other places, has put the infrastructure in place. My hope would be that we burst the seams of space there, like they have been the last several years by putting a six-hour.
“As a little boy, again, not to make it personal, but I went to Road America with my family and we camped. I think that experience reminds me of why we love this so much. I’m super pumped to be able to go there.
“As a kid, it was a 500-mile race for decades and decades. Hopefully, we’ll make 500 miles in six hours. Maybe we’ll do more than that!”
The decision to swap the Road America and Indianapolis formats was made for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the biggest one was to create a better “cadence” to the season.
This way, the penultimate round of the 2026 season at Indy – held 10 days before the start of the Petit Le Mans race meeting – serves as a nice prelude to the finale, while the summer months are bolstered with two longer races, at Watkins Glen in June and now Road America in August.
Budgets were also a consideration. Rather than add Road America as a sixth Endurance Cup race, keeping it at five, IMSA feels, makes most sense for the competitors.
Adding another weekend or another few hours to a race is something that we take very seriously
“Just adding an endurance round or an additional weekend is very difficult. I try my hardest, as does our entire staff, to keep our finger on the pulse of the budgets. Adding another weekend or another few hours to a race is something that we take very seriously,” Doonan explained.
“You saw that when we transitioned from Canadian Tire Motorsport Park with the full slate of classes. We probably had to give some relief somewhere.
“I don’t like that for fans who don’t see all the classes, but we do our ever best to try to move the Rubik’s cube around to get it all to fit in the weekends and also to be sensitive to budget.
“The idea of flexibility is key here.”
What does this move tell us about the future of IMSA racing in Indianapolis? Doonan stressed that he is keen to keep the iconic venue on the schedule for years to come.
“I think in every discussion with Doug Boles (Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s president), with Roger Penske (the speedway owner), they want to continue to be part of this. We want that iconic circuit on our calendar.
“There’s no doubt things can change. At this moment, we have a long-term promotor agreement with them and that’s our goal.”
Looking wider, the list of venues on the 2026 IMSA SportsCar Championship schedule is identical to 2025. But that doesn’t mean Doonan and his team aren’t looking around at other opportunities to take IMSA racing to different circuits in the future.
The Pilot Challenge calendar, for instance, features a standalone weekend at Mid-Ohio again, and events like that could provide a gateway to seeing IMSA venture further afield. Doonan confirmed that additional weekends like that are being considered and inquiries from circuits are being fielded.
“I think we keep our eye out,” he continued when asked about the potential for different circuits to feature on the calendar in the future. “We do survey the paddock, the partners, the teams about places that they would envision running at some point. We keep our eyes open to that.
“If I were to say what market do you not race in right now that you wish you could, I’d say the Pacific Northwest would be a really exciting place for us. High-tech market up there, especially in Seattle with the companies that are there. A huge car culture in that part of the country.
“At the same time, I’m super sensitive, as are all of our staff, that when we go to the west coast we’re going to do it all in a west coast swing. We cannot ask people to go out there for an event, come back, go out there, come back.
“It’s decisions like that that we’re trying to make those things very methodical and with sensitivity to the teams and to the partners that want to activate at these events.
“We’d also love to get back to Lime Rock. We had deep discussions with Dicky Riegel and his team. We’re doing a standalone at Mid-Ohio, I thought it worked incredibly well last year. We want to continue to look at those weekends where we can feature Pilot Challenge and some of the others. It makes a really nice operation and event for the promoters.”
Images courtesy of IMSA
