Hey hey, fellow race nerds!
It's your least favorite time of the year...the racing season is almost over. Baseball is in playoffs, NFL is just ramping up, hockey is still in its early days, but racing is getting harder and harder to find. Luckily for you, I don't understand the term "off season." What's that? There's always testing and such in the time between races.
And for IMSA fans, it's been more than 3 weeks since the checkered flag fell at Petit Le Mans, but there's still plenty to analyze from the 2026 season. Too much, actually. Trying to crunch all the numbers has left me in a bit of a daze, finding new little tidbits literally every time I open spreadsheets. They can be ones I've stared at for hours before, yet something new jumps out. I keep annoying my partner with little "huh"s and "hmm"s, and when he asks "What?" I throw some random stat out. The 60 was the only GTP car not to get a podium in 2026 and every other GTP earned at least 2 podium finishes. This year saw the third fewest GTP racing miles achieved since the merge, 439 fewer than last year, and this despite being the second year with an additional endurance race. 26 cars won a race and 46 cars earned a podium. Phillip Ellis and Dudu Barrichello were the only full season GTD drivers to earn poles in that class.
To be fair, they interest him too, but it's become a frequent occurrence in this household that I have a moment of nerd that needs to be shared.
More fascinating stats from 2026 include the fact that IMSA had the closest average pole times in LMP2 and GTD since the classes began, and the second closest in GTD Pro.
Not all the stats are good, however, and it does not tell the whole story to focus only on the positive. 247 drivers started a race this year, down almost 10% from last year. Then there's the yellow situation. This year, 31% of the race season was spent behind the safety car, 22 hours 2 minutes and 29 seconds out of a possible 72 hours of racing. Yes, there was 6 and a half hours of yellow at Daytona because of the fog. Two things: if I removed that from the consideration, I would also have to remove all other yellow flag moments from the years for weather, of which there have been MANY. Secondly, if I remove the yellow from Daytona for fog, it then becomes one of the best-behaved races of the year, with 2 hours and 15 minutes behind the safety car. I also do not count red flag time against any of these numbers, so the 38% at PLM was without that.
Lap-wise, 467 laps were led by the safety car, up from 361 last year. The previous record was 388 in 2024, and the fewest laps was in 2020 where only 190 laps of caution were recorded. Car count and class played no correlating role this year, either. The races with no GTPs (2) had 14 laps of yellow while races with no LMP2s (4) had only 43. You can't blame the dentists, people. FYI, there were no dentists in LMP2. We did have a maxillofacial surgeon in MX-5 Cup :)
If you haven't been here before, welcome. If you've been waiting allllllll season to see who did well, who struggled, who superseded their cars, and who under-performed, Merry Christmas. I'm back. Although as you know, not all racing is done yet, so I'm having to crunch the numbers in between other work obligations. It might take me a minute to get all 5 of the reviews published, but I promise they will be worth the read. How does this work? I analyze the numbers. The numbers don't tell the whole story, but they do give a clearer overview of the story that gets lost in the week-to-week. What've I learned in the last year? Drivers are not always allowed to look good. They are not always allowed to drive the cars to their max performance, and frequently we see drivers appear to struggle when really they are being sacrificed by not getting new tires or being made to run to a program that isn't flattering. It's important to remember that a rising tide floats all ships, and perhaps the people who find most success are those who stay balanced best.
Anyways, I get my numbers from publicly available data, all harness from Al Kamel Systems at results.imsa.com. I do spreadsheets, manually inputting the Fastest Lap time from each race from each driver, and comparing how the driver/team/manufacturer does over the course of the year. It starts to reveal patterns, and the patterns tell stories. In these reviews, I'll give you GTP by team, LMP2 by driver rating, GTD Pro and GTD (tbd format, to be honest, but likely team by team), and the GT3 manufacturer performance breakdown, an in-depth analysis of which brand had the most speed and which one used their pace and BoP to their advantage.
Like I said, Merry Christmas, fellow nerds.
GTP analysis will be up in the next few days! Thanks for coming with me down another vortex of numbers.
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