American Le Mans Series
Patrón Highcroft Racing to race Acura ARX-01c in 2010
© Patrón Highcroft Racing
After winning the 2009 American Le Mans Series LMP1 championship for Acura with the Acura ARX-02a Patrón Highcroft Racing will contest next year’s championship with an Acura ARX-01c. The team announced their renewed cooperation with Honda Performance Development today.
Patrón Highcroft Racing and Honda Performance Development (HPD) will continue their relationship into 2010, a season in which Duncan Dayton’s team will be the official HPD team and will test the new ARX-01c as well as a new HPD engine, which could be used during the 2011 season.
As the American Le Mans Series will combine the LMP1 and LMP2 classes into one prototype class, except for the races at Sebring and Petit Le Mans, HPD and Patrón Highcroft Racing have decided to run the LMP2 spec car rather than the LMP1 Acura ARX-02a.
Team owner Duncan Dayton is very positive about the 2010 season. “We will have the #1 on our car for 2010 and firmly believe the ARX-01c will give us the best opportunity to defend that championship. We are very much looking forward to continuing our working relationship with the team at HPD - they have played an integral role in our championship success.”
“We are awaiting full details from the ALMS, but we expect the LMP1 cars to be slowed and the LMP2 machines to be offered more performance freedoms.
“Everyone saw the performance of the ARX-01b at this year’s ALMS race at Laguna Seca, and we think this car will be a very wise weapon of choice for 2010. The combined prototype class is going to provide some extremely fierce competition and our team is very much looking forward to the fight.”
While one car is confirmed for next season Dayton confirmed that talks are underway to try and run a second car. “We’re talking to a number of potential new marketing partners to add to our sponsorship portfolio - partners the team has been negotiating with and others who might be supporting a specific driver.”
With Scott Sharp moving to his own GT2 team, Extreme Speed Motorsports, Patrón Highcroft Racing’s only confirmed driver so far is David Brabham. His teammate(s) will be confirmed at a later date.
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Well I’m available just let me get MY sponsorship portfolio together heh heh. In all seriousness though this seems like another repeat of the penske porsches pretty well loop holing their way to victory after victory by going p2 instead, thus dominating even the p1 cars. p1 just gets slower and slower every year, according to the rules anyway. If you’re gonna make them slower, then at least make the races longer I don’t wanna see 1.5 hrs of 150 kmh I wanna see 1.5 hours of 300 kmh or several hours of 200. less sense as the seasons go by.
glad to see the manufacturers are still maintaining their intelligence by exposing loop holes in the ever shoddy aco/fia system and actually using lower classes to beat out the big guns. I mean c’mon a p2 winning sebring overall? what gives. before you know it the proto classes will need to be flip flopped, as all the works will be at p2 and all the privateers in p1 getting their butts handed to them. ACO/FIA please change your rules to at least make sense, screw satisfying the fans at this point that’s much too high an expectation, I just want rules that make a lick of sense!
Connor I think you’ve forgotten that the ALMS’ goal is actually to bring LMP1 and LMP2 together into one class so that they’re racing each other for the overall win… It’s legit this time.
Acura is just out of sync with this news. Going back to a P2 car? They spent all that money developping the P1 rig. The ACO would have been forced to keep closing the gap to the diesels if manufacturers were getting interested in P1.
I was really looking forward to an Acura/Aston matchup at Sebring in P1 (I think Aston is coming). Hopefully DeFerran keeps a P1 car.
Aw man I didn’t think of aston that would’ve been killer. Thanks bamba I’m sad now
Japan vs Britain, has that ever been done before (in motorsports I mean:)
Well I would it’s been done before: F1, Rallye, even LeMans, Mazda won the 24h overall before and the ‘Honda’ NSX won GT2 twice.