IMSA: #48 Paul Miller Racing wins 2018 GTD team championship
The GTD category of the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship saw a heated battle of its own, which came down to the final race of the season.
Grand Touring Daytona (GTD) has long served as the home for privateer GT racing in America with the standardization of the global GT3 car requirements.
The competition was fierce in this category of the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship between the two longtime privateer heavy hitters of Paul Miller Racing with their Lamborghini Huracan GT3 and Meyer-Shank Racing with Curb Agajanian fielding two Acura NSX GT3 cars.
The car diversity that IMSA’s GTLM is famous for understandably extends to GTD, where the entry prices can be relatively lower and single-car teams have just as much chance at winning as factory-backed efforts. The GTD class sported a hearty field of Audi, Lamborghini, Lexus, Porsche, BMW, Mercedes, Ferrari and Acura grand touring cars, which created exceptional competition.
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Paul Miller Racing have been involved in American grand touring motorsports since the early 1980s, and they have been involved with IMSA since 1988. In the 2018 season, the #48 car took the team championship through consistently good results.
The #48, which was driven full-time by Bryan Sellers and Madison Snow, racked up a total of six podium finishes and a further two class wins in the 11-race calendar, scoring a total of 303 points in the process.
Michael Shank joined the Grand-AM Rolex Sports Car Series in 2004 as a team owner and stuck through the IMSA merger in 2014. The newly branded and funded Meyer-Shank Racing team took control of the Acura NSX effort for the 2018 season.
Meyer-Shank Racing were originally only slated to be a single-car effort with the #93 NSX being driven by Lawson Aschenbach and Justin Marks and the #86 only scheduled to participate in the four endurance races on the IMSA calendar.
However, after the #86 car had an impressive start to the season, Shank managed to find the funding to run the #86 car with Katherine Legge as the full-time driver and Alvaro Parente, Trent Hindman, A.J. Allmendinger and Mario Farnbacher rotating as the other drivers throughout the season. The #86 car managed two race wins and a further five podium finishes throughout the season to earn 297 points.
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With IMSA improving efforts to keep GTD an affordable option for GT3 spec teams with a non-pro driver being mandated, we can rest assured that the large fields of competitive cars are here to stay in the WeatherTech Sportscar Championship‘s GTD class.