The Merged IMSA Win List

by Sean Wrona

When Champ Car and IndyCar reunited in 2008, IndyCar acquired all the past CART and Champ Car data to create one unified win list including all series with a historical connection to the IndyCar/Champ Car ladder (although unfortunately the Wikipedia version of this list is greatly superior to anything that appears on the IndyCar site). I do not know whether the current merged Tudor United SportsCar Championship owns the rights to both the Grand-Am and ALMS data, but what I do know is that I was looking for a combined list for all U.S. sports car championships related to the original IMSA Camel GT Championship and was unable to find anything so I did so myself. The below list includes all races from IMSA GT (1971-98), United States Road Racing Championship (1998-99), ALMS (1999-2013), Grand-Am (2000-2013), and the merged TUSC up to and including the just completed race at Long Beach (I wanted to make sure I got this up before the Laguna Seca races tomorrow. In determining class wins, I counted wins in all classes that were regularly scheduled but if an entry was a class winner in a minor class that only appeared in one or two races a season (this occasionally happened at the 24 Hours of Daytona and 12 Hours of Sebring where there were a handful of additional classes that weren't long-lasting or memorable). I did include all classes that were regularly scheduled, even if some of them were relatively minor, such as the All American Challenge class from 1989-91, which only competed in GT races and on rare occasions by itself, but it seems rather similar in spirit to the Prototype Challenge class today and I believe it's unfair to exclude it. A few drivers have a greater number of overall wins than class wins, such as the winners of the 1992 and 1995 24 Hours of Daytona who never won again. These drivers did not meet the class specifications for the premier class so although they were accepted as overall winners they did not win any of the regularly scheduled classes. This is not an error. Because of the complex way sports car racing is organized, with different classes competing in different events (especially in the Camel GT era when GT drivers competed for overall wins in events containing only their cars often, unlike now when it is rare) and because I simply tallied the total number of wins, it is likely I made some mistakes (additionally because many might argue that some of the one-off classes in the 24 Hours of Daytona should count), but this is a start. Sports car racing now lacks prestige with the general public in part because of the large number of different organizations and sanctioning bodies that have held races. How do you even begin to sort out the history without merged lists? So too many American racing fans tend to ignore the sport as a result (even with the International Motorsports Hall of Fame's clear and obvious NASCAR bias and U.S. bias in general, Hurley Haywood, Butch Leitzinger, and James Weaver should have been inducted a long time ago...I'll ignore Scott Pruett for the time being since he is still full-time). Hopefully this will provide perspective on the true legends of American sports car racing. I realize this still isn't perfect because there was a period when the 24 Hours of Daytona was a sanctioned Trans-Am, not IMSA, race. Should I just go all the way and include Trans-Am, Can-Am, original USRRC, and Pirelli World Challenge races to compile a COMPLETE list of the U.S. road racing tradition? That might be interesting in and of itself because while some of these series were sports car series and others were touring car series, it can be difficult to even sort out the distinctions between which is which...Trans-Am is now usually called a touring car series but used to sanction the 24 Hours of Daytona, which the sports car series do now. However, I'm going to stick with the merged IMSA win list for starters and include all the series affiliated with the IMSA tradition to begin the process of summarizing the U.S. sports car racing tradition. Drivers are sorted by overall wins, then by class wins. I was working on this project in the last week or two and letting my more advanced statistics slide, but my next column which I certainly intend to complete before next weekend will statistically analyze the first four IndyCar races of this season in advance of the month of May. I think this is more interesting anyway since this is something I have been looking for for quite some time and found nowhere. Obviously you can't judge drivers by wins alone. Few would argue that Memo Rojas belongs in such exalted company since he generally piggybacked off Scott Pruett's success and was unable to win without Pruett, while Pruett was able to win with many other co-drivers, but it's a start. There were many drivers with relatively few wins I was very surprised to see on the list: Joe Amato, Geoff Bodine, Robbie Buhl, Bill Elliott, Chip Ganassi, Caitlyn Jenner, Bob Lazier (though not Buddy), Kyle Petty, Jimmy Vasser, and Dennis Vitolo among them (I was already aware of Terry Labonte and Jerry Nadeau's wins so I didn't list them). This really does capture a microcosm of American racing even if the Grand-Am/ALMS split caused too much of IMSA's great history to be forgotten (but at least that split was considerably less bitter than CART and IRL as while the fans slung mud at each other far too often, the combatants generally didn't, unlike in the IndyCar split). On to the list, which includes an awe-inspiring 908 names on it (I'd have made separate lists for overall and class wins if the list was shorter). Unfortunately, it does look like a few of my counts slightly differ from those in this article, so maybe I did release this a bit too soon.

Sean Wrona is the Managing Editor of racermetrics.com, the Webmaster of race-database.com, the winner of the 2010 Ultimate Typing Championship at the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin, and the ratings compiler and statistician for the Mensa Scrabble-by-Mail SIG. He earned a master's in applied statistics from Cornell University in 2008 and previously digitized several seasons of NBA box scores on basketball-reference.com. You may contact him at sean@racermetrics.com.

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