IMSA President John Doonan: On Scheduling, On Co-operation, & On LMDh

We’re keeping speculation on the immediate future in our sport to a bare minimum on DSC. We will, however, bring you and significant statements from the people in positions to make decisions on when and where we get back to racing, and on the wider questions of the direction that racing will take in the future.

With that in mind here are the pertinent parts of a media round table conference call hosted by IMSA President John Doonan earlier this week:

On Scheduling:

We continue to try and stay positive on the IMSA side.  we’ve focused on the schedule changes for the rest of the 2020 season and got those out. 

We also gave ourselves some gaps in the latter part of the year in case there is a window to go racing. 

We’ll hopefully be able to pinpoint exactly when we can go back to racing soon. We just didn’t want to continue to send out any changes until we had some more firm understanding.

In the event of additional races needing to be rescheduled, has there been dialogue with IndyCar and SRO America for potential joint races? Is that something your realistically see happening or is it a priority to have IMSA standalone events?

First of all, I have to commend the cooperation between the sanctioning bodies, not just here in the states with SRO, IndyCar, NASCAR, but certainly with the ACO and WEC trying to make sure nobody is stepping on one another. We tried to put some gaps into our season, open weekends. I think there are opportunities to share weekends as we have typically done at Long Beach or Belle Isle with IndyCar and certainly would hope we could all work together to go down in history as one of the unique seasons ever.

I think it is realistic to think there are possibilities. I know IndyCar has their weekend in early October that they have identified as an additional Grand Prix, but our hope is to certainly try to stick with what we have currently published and if we need to add things in, we’ll look at any and all alternatives to be able to provide the right value and content for our partners and our fans.

Is the Indianapolis round in early October a possibility or is it no longer a possibility from IMSA’s standpoint? 

I think probably the easiest thing to say and I think my colleagues in any sanctioning body would agree that everything has to be on the table just because you work one day to make progress and for all the right reasons, there might be a different decision by a local authority or something. At the moment, every schedule option for any of the sanctioning bodies I think needs to be on the table so we can fulfil the season that everyone hopes and wants.

Would you be open to adding prototypes at Lime Rock or VIR to help complete their season or is that not an option?

You are reading our minds frankly. We’ve looked at every option. We’re trying to find places that makes sense for the teams. I think that’s another huge factor besides just getting the races in is just making sure our race teams have proper timing between events, proper tow distances and things like that. We’ve got a big ol’ whiteboard with Post-It notes everywhere and lots of spreadsheets and we’ve got a bunch of different scenarios and I think, again, anything is on the table.

The Governor in Florida said he would be open to racing without fans. I wondered what you think and if there’s any talk about doing that and whether not you think it might happen with any of the series and whether or not that’s a possibility down the line with IMSA?

I did hear that. I think the thing I said to everyone was I wish there was a siren or green light that would go off that would tell us that it’s good to go back to business as usual or ‘normal.’ If we were able to do something as an industry, and I speak for the whole industry, in a safe format, I think we could do some things that would be proper social messages. 

Things that we could broadcast that remind people of staying safe and potentially getting tested and things like that. It really starts with our medical professionals. We’ve got great medical liaisons on the IMSA and NASCAR side. There are obviously many experts out there that really are first and foremost that probably need to be engaged there. If there is a way to do that for motorsport, it would be amazing. I think our business model is also focused on our promoters. 

I would always want our races to be successful for our teams, our stakeholders and our promoters. We do count on the folks that have, for so many years, sat on the hills of the race track and watched us compete at IMSA. Hopefully, we can do that. We certainly would do it via television. Like you, I want to get back to racing as normal, and if we could go back without fans, we would have to take a look at that.

In the real world, what kind of challenges have you encountered with all of the participants now scattered across the globe?

First of all, mass gathering was really the trigger point with not being able to fulfil Sebring in its normal slot with the border closing, limited travel abilities for our international drivers, engineers, and mechanics. 

I think the fact that different states have different policies right now and different dates out there is also a critical metric to determine whether we can go back to racing at a particular venue at a certain time.

There are sensitivities to our teams about not having too many back-to-back events.  We’d certainly avoid a triple or three events in a row. We have done the back-to-back from Watkins Glen to Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, but we were very careful with that as it puts a lot of strain on our teams and their personnel to turn things around. 

Everybody’s budgets are very sensitive right now. These are not normal times, so we’ve had to think outside the box. 

The tricky part is, you feel like one day you’ve made progress and you wake up the next day and there are some changes. We remain super positive we can go racing sooner rather than later. As soon as we know, we’ll get the information out as quickly as we possibly can.

With the problems the world is currently facing and the likely economic downturn, is it realistic for LMDh, a new class for IMSA and WEC, actually coming in at the start of 2022? Are there any thoughts of delaying it?

We have had a technical team here at IMSA and the technical teams at ACO literally meeting daily finalizing the regulations, and it’s given them the opportunity to continue to make progress and put more detail into the ‘draft’ set of regulations. 

We are in constant communication with the constructors and with the suppliers on the car. 

The key is we’ve tried to make that progress and also be sensitive to the global situation. We don’t want to force anything. 

We rely on the voice of our OEM partners to determine when they’re ready. 

We made the announcement at Daytona. We’d like to get these regulations in the hands of the OEMs when that’s appropriate and when we’re ready and then let them be the gauge of the official start date. 

Communication between IMSA and the ACO has been daily. In fact, I talk to Gerard (Neveu) at least daily, if not twice a day. We hope to have the regulations out as soon as possible, and the timeline will really be determined by the manufacturers.