JDC-Miller Motorsports will switch to DPi, when the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship 2019 starts at Daytona in January.
The team already participates this year with two ORECA LMP2 cars, but they have bought two Cadillac DPi-V.R cars for the upcoming season.
JDC-Miller Motorsports has announced that Stephen Simpson will continue for the team during their 2019 campaign. The future for Simon Trummer, Robert Alon and Misha Goikhberg is yet to be confirmed.
The team won the 6 Hours at the Glen in June with the #99, nicknamed the “Red Dragon”, and grabbed Pole Position at the latest round at Road America with the “Banana Boat” #85.
The first car will be delivered to the team in September, and the plan is to start testing in November.
Photo Courtesy of IMSA / Richard Dole
It was announced last week that DPi and LMP2 would be split into two categories next year, so the DPi cars will no longer be slowed down to LMP2 speed. But that means the ACO approved cars no longer can fight for overall wins, but only class victories. There is a Le Mans ticket for the best LMP2 team in the 2019 season, but is that enough to make the Pro-Am teams enter, or do they still want to be fighting for overall wins?
JDC-Miller Motorsports has certainly chosen side now, and there are talks about CORE autosport also having a DPi programme on their hands. If that is true, there are only two current LMP2 cars left in the shape of AFS/PR1 Mathiasen Motorspors and Performance Tech Motorsports.
The Daytona 24 timers race won’t be as attractive for European LMP2 teams, since they will no longer be fighting for the overall win, which they in theory was able to do in 2017 and 2018. Technical issues did however prevent them for being a threat to the DPi opposition. So unless you want to get some mileage on your new driver combination, and doing some in-race endurance testing, there is no reason for the ELMS and/or FIA WEC teams to go to Daytona 2019, which is a great shame for the race. On top of that, we have the FIA WEC teams in the middle of a season – but Daytona is in the middle of their long winter break from November to March.
There are still two rounds left of the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship 2018 for the prototype teams, while GTD has three races and GTLM with three races plus one unofficial race in November.
