FABCAR-Porsche Daytona Prototype

Feature Test
Click above image for specs on the FABCAR-Porsche Daytona Prototype

Take a seat. This could get confusing. The car pictured here is called a Daytona Prototype (DP). It's built by an Indianapolis race shop called FABCAR Engineering. It's powered by a Porsche six-cylinder engine, and No. 59 finished fifth in this year's 24 Hours of Daytona endurance race, campaigned by Hurley Haywood, J.C. France, Scott Goodyear, and Scott Sharp for Brumos Racing.

This DP car also illustrates the rift currently going on in U.S. sports-car racing. Like the tumultuous feud between CART and IRL, there are now two sports-car sanctioning bodies vying for racers and fans—IMSA, which hosts the American Le Mans Series, and the Grand American Road Racing Association and its Rolex Sports Car Series.

The ALMS has ties to the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans, uses the same rules, and thus provides a stateside stage for high-flying Le Mans cars such as the Audi R8, the Cadillac LMP, and the Panoz LMP-07. The ALMS series was founded in 1999 by entrepreneur Don Panoz. It will present 10 races this season that vary in duration from two to 12 hours. Its marquee event is the 12 Hours of Sebring in Florida.

The Grand American Road Racing Association was formed in 1999 by Bill France Jr., whose family fortune was made as the creator of NASCAR. At the time, Grand American used Le Mans rules out of necessity, owing to the existing supply of Le Mans-legal race cars. However, the organization has plans to slowly evolve its own rules and classes. The Daytona Prototype is the first class specifically for the Grand American Rolex Sports Car Series, and as such the cars are not eligible for Le Mans or Sebring.

The Rolex series will host 12 U.S. races this year. The series' big event is the 24 Hours of Daytona. In the Grand American scheme, DP cars are the fastest of four classes (in decreasing order of speed, the classes are DP, GTS, GT, and SRPII). This is the first year for the DP cars, and we wanted to get a closer look at one. In February, five days after the 24-hour Daytona event, Brumos Racing met us at Roebling Road Raceway outside Savannah, Georgia, with its DP car.

One could say a DP car is the NASCAR version of a sports car. Compared with the Le Mans cars from Audi, Cadillac, and Panoz, DP cars seem rather low-tech. The idea is to keep the costs down and encourage parity, which is a lot like NASCAR's philosophy.

For example, DP cars use a full-length steel-tube chassis that supports the front and rear suspensions, the mid-mounted engine, and the rear-mounted transmission. The Le Mans cars from Audi and Cadillac used a pricey carbon-fiber tub and hung the rear suspension off the rear-mounted engine-and-transmission assembly. The DPs' wheelbase, height, width, and cockpit dimensions are all mandated to within a range of about two inches. The effectiveness of aerodynamic aids is also carefully restricted, and chassis makers have to obtain approval from Grand American.