By: RACER Staff | August 5, 2018 7:55 AM Two-time IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar champion and three-time Rolex 24 winner Christian Fittipaldi will retire from top-level racing after the 2019 Rolex 24 At Daytona.

The 47-year-old Fittipaldi, whose next race will be the 2018 IMSA season-ending Petit Le Mans, took on the role of sporting director for Action Express in January, stepping aside from full-time competition to allow Filipe Albuquerque to join the No.5 Cadillac DPi team full-time.“Everything in life has a beginning, middle, and end — and I am at the beginning of the end of this stage of my career and competing at this level,” said Fittipaldi. “All that I can say is that it has been an awesome trip. Thank you to mom and dad, and to my whole family. Without them I couldn’t have had the opportunities that I have had all through my career. My wife and daughter have given me so much motivation, especially in the later stages of my racing career.”

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Fittipaldi’s third Rolex 24 win, which came this year in the No. 5 Mustang Sampling Cadillac DPi-V.R with Filipe Albuquerque and his longtime co-driver, Joao Barbosa, with whom he shared the championships and the majority of his IMSA wins, was what started him thinking about retirement from driving.“I think one of the last items of it – and it was a huge weight that came off my back – was Daytona this year,” he said. “After what happened in 2017 – and don’t take me wrong, I’m not here to point fingers if Ricky (Taylor) should be disqualified or if he shouldn’t. I’m way beyond that. If he pulled a good move or a bad move, at the end of the day, we lost the race and they won the race, and I thought we would have won the race. So, we kept that for almost a year and it was heavy inside the team.

“When we managed to pull it this year, I said, ‘Wow, three is a cool number.’ Obviously, four, five or six would be even nicer, but three is a cool number. I think that started generating the little snowball. From that point onward, I went to Long Beach and it was the first time I was out of the car and I was spotting for the team and helping out the team technically. Then something else clicked in.“My relationship with my family, my daughter, my age, so it’s the package. It’s not one thing. It’s not that I went out there, I had a huge accident and said, ‘Whoa, now I’m afraid of doing this. I can’t do this anymore.’ It wasn’t that. It was the package and I think the timing is correct. I’m going to respect the timing a lot.”

Fittipaldi made a name for himself in Formula 3000 before three years in Formula 1 with Minardi and the Footwork Arrows teams. He arrived on the North American open-wheel scene in 1995 with Walker Racing and immediately scored a runner-up result in his first-ever Indianapolis 500. He moved to NASCAR competition with Richard Petty Racing before racing in A1GP, American Le Mans and Brazilian stock car competition.Fittipaldi joined Action Express in 2011, winning the 2014 and 2015 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championships as well as the North American Endurance Cup titles in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. With co-drivers Joao Barbosa and Filipe Albuquerque, he claimed two Rolex 24 overall wins in 2014 and 2018, adding to his Rolex victory with Bell Motorsports in 2004.

“I wanted to give it a shot,” he said of ending his career after Daytona. “I owe a lot to Daytona. I owe a lot to the France family and Daytona has brought me a lot of happiness. I have had a lot of success there. We won three times. I think I have six or seven podiums in total. Maybe it’s not Scott Pruett’s statistics, but it’s not bad.”As sporting director at Action Express, Fittipaldi has raced in the endurance events while also being on site for IMSA event weekends as part of the performance engineering effort for the team and serving as a liaison with team sponsors.

“To IMSA, thanks for all the great opportunities,” said Fittipaldi. “Jim France has once again built something really incredible and has been key to making everything happen, from his original vision to this great upward path of growth. This is an amazing paddock with very strong teams, so many manufacturers and great tracks on the entire schedule. To Cadillac and ECR, thank you for all the horsepower and downforce.”

By: Marshall Pruett | August 3, 2018 4:45 PM IMSA will split its Daytona Prototype internationals and spec LMP2s into separate classes starting in 2019.The factory DPis will no longer receive Balance of Performance adjustments in relation to the privateer P2s, which should unleash a decent amount of speed that has been dialed back under the current DPi/P2 balancing practice. Starting next season, DPis from Acura, Cadillac, Mazda, and Nissan will have a class-specific BoP designed to created parity solely within the DPi class.

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In P2, a shift to full Pro-Am status will take place, which creates further alignment with the FIA World Endurance Championship P2 category. At present, IMSA’s P2 teams are permitted to use Pro-Pro driver lineups, and once the new season gets under way, it will transition to the required use of one Bronze- or Silver-rated driver to go with a driver of any rating—most likely a Gold- or Platinum-rated professional—for the standard rounds.For the Michelin Endurance Cup rounds, up to five drivers will be allowed in P2. Drive-time restrictions will be announced at a later date for Gold- and Platinum-rated drivers in the class for Daytona, Sebring, Watkins Glen, and Petit Le Mans at Road America.

With the adoption of full Pro-Am rules in P2, the Jim Trueman Award will be given to the Bronze- or Silver-rated driver who finishes the highest in the championship; an entry to compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans will also be granted. In the Pro-Am GT Daytona class, the same program will continue under the Bob Akin Award banner.

IMSA has developed a new plan for GTD Bronze and Silver drivers that will provide extra track time prior to qualifying, and a policy change has also been implemented where Am drivers who qualify GTD cars must start the race. Ams taking part in the special practice session will be able to purchase an extra set of new dry Michelin tires.

“As we continue to evolve the WeatherTech Championship, we’ve engaged in extensive dialogue with our stakeholders to consider appropriate refinements,” said IMSA Vice President, Competition Simon Hodgson. “The changes we will implement in 2019 are based upon the feedback we’ve received from all WeatherTech Championship class stakeholders in the paddock. We expect the changes will be popular with participants and IMSA fans alike.”

By: Stephen Kilbey | 8 hours ago RLR Msport and Canadian driver John Farano are working on racing in the 2019 running of the Rolex 24 Hours and the 24 Hours of Le Mans with their new ORECA 07 Gibson, RACER has learned.The team, which currently leads the LMP3 class standings in the European Le Mans Series with just one race to go, has announced that it is going to enter its new ORECA 07 Gibson with Farano in the full ELMS season next year. The team hopes part of its 2019 season will include Le Mans, should it obtain an invite.

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“I’ve driven Le Mans three times in the past, but not in the main race, so I hope we can race there in 2019 as I love the track and the whole event,” Farano told RACER at Snetterton during his second LMP2 test with regular RLR driver Job Van Uitert.“We hope to put the 24 Hours of Daytona on our list for 2019, too. If we do that, we won’t have any other testing time after the end-of-season ELMS test at Portimao, but we’ll get the Roar in January and the late test in December at Daytona.”“We’re working on it,” he continued when asked about his pre-2019 ELMS preparation schedule.

“I’ve run at Daytona many times, and there’s a lot I like about it. The car is well suited to the track, and it’s a great way to prepare for the season, we’ll almost be using the Rolex as a test. It suits everybody in the team and other drivers we hope we can have come along too.“As a Gentlemen, I like what they’ve done with splitting the classes, it’s perfect. IMSA recognised that they needed the change. I’m now interested in doing an IMSA program with the long races; one day maybe we’ll do that in the future, too.”

By: Marshall Pruett | November 20, 2018 10:10 AM Michelin continues to receive encouraging feedback while finalizing its new IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship tires.“In the time we’ve had with teams across all the classes in IMSA, a theme that we keep hearing emerge when they try our tires is that they’re very good at multitasking,” said Ken Payne,

Michelin North America’s technical director for motorsports. “If you want to trail-brake in while cornering or start rolling in the throttle mid-corner to exit, apparently they’re finding our tires are pleasantly capable of doing such things.”For Michelin’s existing teams in IMSA’s GT Le Mans category, 2019 should feel no different from recent years where the brand’s approach to tire compounds will be unchanged. Teams in Prototype, for example, will need to adjust to Michelin’s methodology,

which differs from the usual grip model of soft, medium, or hard provided by other endurance racing tire manufacturers.Michelin’s mindset targets ambient temperature ranges first — making it easier to pick a compound based on the environment faced by the tires on any given day — and once that decision has been made, teams can select the desired durability characteristics offered within that compound choice.

It’s a new level of customization that extends beyond previous norms.“It very much is in that domain of temperatures,” Payne said. “You could really characterize the one tire as a medium that is in the cooler to medium temperature range window, and then the other tire is for the higher, hotter conditions. We’ve factored in the unique characteristics of places like The Glen and CTMP in the summer months. What we’re going to have in terms of our hot tire for LMP2 is maybe a bit more of a hard hot than a medium hot that we would have,

say, in GTLM.“Our philosophy definitely is targeting tires that are intended to work in temperature ranges and pretty broad temperature ranges as well. That’s one of the changes that we may see with the slight revision for the IMSA spec tires versus the WEC tires, is that they’ll probably wind up having little bit broader functional range in terms of the temperature windows that they can work in.

”Prototype teams will have plenty of time to log miles in testing at Daytona International Speedway before the new Michelin era officially begins at the Rolex 24 At Daytona in late January. With memories of repeat and worrisome high-speed tire failures during the 2018 race, Payne says he does not anticipate similar dramas with its product.“Carcass durability or casing endurance, tire endurance in general, is a first-order consideration for Michelin no matter what the domain or track is,” he added. “The tire we’re starting with, the LMP2 tire, is quite a robust design and in fact, we will not have a Daytona-specific tire for the prototypes. Just as within GTLM today, there is not a Daytona-specific tire.

But what we do is we have a very rigorous protocol to validate our tire constructions for the different tracks and load and operating conditions that we use. It starts with simulation testing.“It goes into machine testing with very proprietary, confidential algorithms and controls to the processes of that testing. All of that is rolled into determining what the tire design should be and then into the matrix that we provide the teams of pressure and camber recommendations. I say recommendations, but actually, requirements might be a better word to use. We’re very specific in that we’ll give a team and say, ‘OK, you’re going to Daytona.

If you want to run that tire for one stint, here is the different camber settings you can use, and here is the corresponding minimum hot pressure that you have to run at in order to use that camber setting.’“We do that for all the different tracks that we operate at. That’s one of the ways that we manage those conditions at the tracks, is by giving the teams different boundaries to operate in with respect to camber and pressure settings on the cars. We [recently] had a session down at Daytona with two of the DPI teams, and it was a very productive session, and tire durability was a nonissue.”

By: Marshall Pruett November 26, 2018 8:28 AM Fernando Alonso’s second attempt to win the Rolex 24 at Daytona will come from inside a Cadillac DPi-V.R entered by Wayne Taylor Racing.RACER has confirmed the Spaniard will share the No. 10 WTR entry with Jordan Taylor and Renger van der Zande for IMSA’s season-opening WeatherTech SportsCar Championship event in January with the 2017 Prototype champions. Although it’s unclear whether the team will go with three or four drivers for the event, Alonso’s seat at WTR will likely come at the expense of Ryan Hunter-Reay, who has filled the third-driver role.Alonso made his Rolex 24 debut at the beginning of the year with United Autosports (pictured), the endurance racing team owned by McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown. Saddled with an uncompetitive chassis, the two-time Formula 1 champion, who completed his final grand prix race for McLaren on Sunday, had a forgettable introduction to Daytona.Finishing 38th in the 50-car field, Alonso turned his attention to a dual F1 and FIA World Endurance Championship calendar that added an overall win at the 24 Hours of Le Mans with Toyota which completed the second leg of racing’s ‘Triple Crown.’

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A recent announcement from McLaren has Alonso in the frame to complete the Triple Crown in May when he attempts to win the Indy 500 on his second try in a Chevy-powered Dallara DW12 chassis that will be run by McLaren with technical support from Andretti Autosport.WTR closed the 2018 IMSA championship with a win at Petit Le Mans, and with its 2017 win at the Rolex 24, the team can be expected to feature when WeatherTech Championship action resumes.