DOES NASCAR RUB OFF? Sports car racing goes native.(News)

Byline: 1BILL McGUIRE

They may call it Day-tona International Speedway, but at the Grand-Am season finale they were selling "American fries'' at the concession stand. That tells you all you need to know about the worldview at the home office of the Grand American Road Racing Series. Make no mistake: With its new Daytona Prototypes and other initiatives, the Florida sanctioning body (with tight family connections to NASCAR) has permanently severed all ties with Le Mans and European sports racing. For better or worse Grand-Am, taking with it its marquee event, the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona, has gone its own way, with its own rules, its own cars and its own agenda to make sports car racing a viable (read profitable) sport in America.

No longer willing to endure the periods of boom and bust in international endurance racing, at last season's end the folks in Florida thumbed their nose at the Continent and introduced their own top category, Daytona Prototype. Bearing little resemblance to the high-tech Audis and Bentleys that have swept Le Mans and the American Le Mans Series for the past several years, Daytona Prototypes have composite chassis of carbon fiber and steel tubing, and production-based engines rigidly regulated to about 500 hp. The rest of their technical specs are tightly controlled as well, to hold costs down. Naturally, these new units have met a chorus of boos from sports car purists. To them, the DP cars are slow, funny-looking, and a good 100 hp short of what a "real'' prototype racer should be. One pressroom wit described them as "Jim France's Bandelero cars.''

Grand-Am is also consolidating its junior classes, and by 2005 intends to have only two categories, Daytona Prototype and GT, in the Rolex Series. That move has been widely questioned as well.

Never mind all that, say Grand-Am's managers; purists be hanged. Their goal is to create a car the majority of its potential participants-privateer sportsmen of comfortable but finite means-can afford to race. And with just two classes, they visualize a sport that casual, non-purist fans can make sense of. In Grand-Am's view, large fields with multiple car brands and close racing, not one-off technological marvels pounding around the course without opposition, will grow sports car racing into a mass- audience attraction. Essentially, think NASCAR with right turns. Meanwhile, they think they're winning. "There are two ways to look at inertia,'' says Grand-Am president Roger Edmundson. "It can make you stand still, frozen solid, or it can push you ahead.'' A meager half-dozen of the new Daytona Prototypes showed up for the 24 Hours this past February, and much of the schedule saw only four cars take the flag. But there were 10 DP cars at the season finale, and for the 2004 opener they fully expect 20 cars, maybe more. The Grand-Am folks call that momentum, and it's hard to argue with it, as manufacturers and entrants are stepping up.

Given the small fields for the Prototypes in their inaugural year, coming into the finale the season points fight was a three-way tussle between the two Brumos Fabcar-Porsches, one driven by Hurley Haywood and J.C. France, the other by Mike Borkowski and David Donohue, and the Doran JE4-Chevrolet of Bell Motorsports, handled by Terry Borcheller and Forest Barber. As the first with the most, Brumos was expected to dominate the category, while Bell Motorsports was a latecomer, not arriving until the second race at Homestead. There the Doran-Chevy qualified on the outside pole but retired early with ...