It’s easy to be wistful about defunct racing series of yore, be it CART-era Indycar, Formula 5000 or the sportscar leviathans of Can-Am, but bringing back a reimagined version of a well-loved category carries a risk of its own. What if you build it and nobody comes? What if it’s sacrilegious to the memory of what went before? What if it mirrors the past and drifts into oblivion again?
Back in the day, IMSA’s GTP class pre-dated FISA’s Group C rules and spawned some of the most fantastic and best remembered sportscars of the past 50 years. It ran between 1981 and 1993 and featured epic machinery including Porsche’s ubiquitous 962, Nissan’s fearsome ZX-Turbo and NPT90/91, Jaguar’s legendary XJR range, Ford’s undercooked Probe (and an earlier front-engined Mustang!), Toyota’s striking Eagles, BMW’s sensational but crash-happy March 86G, and the distinctive lines of the Lola-built, Hendrick-run Corvette.
GTP was in many ways an inspiration for Group C, the latter being altered to a fuel economy formula. That gas-saving ethos didn’t sit well in 1980s America, so for there to be an energy-frugal angle to GTP’s comeback is quite the irony. This year, IMSA became the first
