I'm about to post a whole bunch of irony that the Daytonized version of IMSA doesn't get. The connection to the ACO is very important in today's world. The WEC is light years ahead of IMSA in both technology and costs.
Here's some of the irony. In 1999 I was at a Don Panoz' sponsored media event at Road Atlanta. Super memory in my mind.
As I was leaving, I got caught up in the traffic of a cross-country race involving university-sponsored solar raycers and they were headed to Georgia Tech for the weekend on their cross country endurance race. There was a whole lot of ADVANCED technology in this race and they had some BIG time sponsors (see photo below).
I said then and I still say today that the best thing IMSA can do is to link up with these engineering geniuses. These kids are the brains and fans of the future. They might need a separate area from Green Park or they may transform it.
After seeing these advanced endurance prototypes racing across the country using just the energy from the Sun, I checked out their sponsors. I think their sponsors would make most teams in IMSA drool.
Another part of the irony. At Georgia Tech, rather than attempting to build an advanced endurance prototype in the spirit of the ALMS, they built one of the ugliest cars I've ever seen in the image of the newly created Daytona Prototype!
If you are a team owner or manufacturer, would you like to have sponsors like these kid geniuses from across America had? This was back in 1999 but this caliber of sponsors is what is needed. You get the kid geniuses in the universities interested in your sport (if it is technologically relevant) and the sponsors will follow.
