Opinion: Why I Like Sports Car Racing and Why You Should Too

If you’re a frequent reader of the National Racing Network you’re more than aware that we cover all sorts of racing. We’ve got IndyCar, Dirt, NASCAR and even Junior Formulae and the Road to Indy. There’s really something for everyone here. Everyone except sportscar fans, that is. Our intrepid IndyCar writer Ben Carswell is a noted sportscar hater. He’ll tell you he’s not, he just thinks it’s too complicated, and I actually agree with him. I have a beer coozie from last year’s IMSA season that has all the car classes from 2021 and it has five different classes on it. Five! That means for some IMSA races last year you had five different races to follow and up to 50 different cars on track, all doing their own things at their own paces. It’s nuts. I get it. Some might say it’s chaos.  I say it’s some of the best racing in the world and I think you should too. At the very least give it a chance. For me. Let me explain why you should let me be your guide. 

Of all the folks here at NRN, I’m probably one of the newest racing fans. I grew up in southeastern Connecticut, oblivious of all the great racing around me. New England is a racing hotbed with places like Lime Rock, Thompson, and Stafford Springs and a fantastic scene for modified racing and I had no idea it was there. I knew of the Indy 500 and I knew names like Andretti and Unser, mostly from watching Home Improvement. I didn’t really pay attention to any racing until I moved outside of Detroit in the early 2010s. I watched a few Indy 500s on TV and a couple of Detroit Grand Prix from Belle Isle and enjoyed them but it was nothing I ever sought out. I even went to the August NASCAR Cup Series race at MIS in 2014.  In August 2015 I was on a flight back to Detroit and something caught my eye about the IndyCar race at MidOhio that weekend. I did a quick Google and realized it was about 2 hours away. I asked my wife if she was in the mood for a day trip to go watch some racing. We packed some chairs and a cooler of beer and snacks and left the house at 6AM on a Sunday. We got to MidOhio, parked and as soon as I got out of the car I heard the most wonderful noise. Race cars on track. Rotary powered Pro Mazda race cars to be specific. After those were Indy Lights in the brand new IL-15 chassis with engines that made the most spectacular noise off throttle. We hadn’t even opened our chairs and I was hooked. We found a place to sit and cracked open some beers and commenced what has become my favorite activity: sitting in the sun, drinking beer, and watching cars on a track. I enjoyed every single minute of the day, sunburn and all. Graham Rahal won the IndyCar race and the place went nuts. I resolved at that point to watch every bit of IndyCar I could get, and 7 years later I’m writing this in a hotel in downtown Indianapolis finally going to my first Indy 500 this weekend. 

In the middle of all the amazing open wheel racing that day, something else stood out for me. Back in those days, Pirelli World Challenge (Now the SRO GT World Challenge Americas) was a support series for IndyCar with a couple of races during the weekend. I still remember sitting on the hill by Turn 1 at MidOhio facing the kink and whipping my head around to turn 1 trying to process the new noises on track. These were like nothing I had ever heard. These were sports cars. Sports cars from makes like Mercedes, Cadillac, BMW, Audi, Ferrari, Aston Martin, Porsche, and Bentley. Engines of all kinds: V8, V10, V12, flat-6. I had no idea what was happening. It was chaos. I loved every minute of it. Looking back through the pictures and videos I took from that day I have more of that race than any other. A year later I watched the 24 Hours of LeMans for the first time. Yes, the Toyota last lap turbo failure race. A year after that I was at LeMans for the first time. I could go on forever, but I’ll stop. Sidenote: that one Pirelli World Challenge race had such an impact on me and I still couldn’t tell you who won without looking it up. 

One of the reasons I love sports car racing so much is it’s one of the most unchanged forms of motorsport over the years. I could go as far as to say sports car racing is the real stock car racing these days, but that’s an argument for another time. If you watch a GT race you’re going to recognize most of what you’re seeing on track. These aren’t boutique one-off race cars. If you have enough money you can pick up the phone, call the motorsports division of a manufacturer, and order yourself up a shiny new race car that you can go racing across the world in. Sure there are exceptions like LeMans HyperCar and LeMans Prototypes and some might argue that there hasn’t actually been a prototype since the Deltawing, but that’s for another day. With the variety of race cars on track comes a diverse field of drivers. In a sports car race you might have a Formula 1 world champion and an Indy 500 winner racing wheel to wheel against professional sports car drivers and businessmen who have decided to spend some of their fortunes to go racing. Is it chaotic? Absolutely. Is it confusing? It can be. Is it worth a watch? Absolutely. At the end of the 24 hours of Daytona this year, we witnessed one of the greatest battles for a class win I’ve ever seen. I can’t even explain it, but do yourself a favor and check it out on YouTube and remind yourself that all of that took place after almost 24 hours of racing. 

It’s rare now for me not to be watching some kind of racing on a weekend and if I’m not watching on TV, I’m trackside somewhere in the world and I really do credit all of that to that one day in August of 2015. While I’m not an expert, I am a fan and I am passionate and I know if you give sport cars a chance you’ll come to love them as much as I do.