The memories will come flowing back, when the 2019 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season gets going.
This is the 50th year of IMSA, and several teams have used that opportunity to put classic designs on the cars. Some teams only do it for the opening round at Daytona, while others plans to use it throughout the season.
CORE autosport is amongst the latter category, and after acquiring the Nissan ONROAK DPi cars from the new closed down ESM operation, it all of a sudden gave the team a new opportunity.
CORE has traditionally run in white and orange colours on the cars throughout the years, no matter if it was prototypes or GT cars under their own banner, but they will be sporting one of the most iconic colour schemes in not only American motorsport, but actually also at Le Mans.
Graphics: CORE autosport
The Nissan GTP ZX-Turbo car with the blue, white and red colours won the Championship from 1989 to 1991, but it was actually also on the Nissan R91CP winning car at the 1992 Rolex 24 at Daytona.
Some Le Mans fans might recognize the colours from Nissan’s own shot in 2015 with the GTR-LM, but Nissan themselves probably wants to erase that memory, since the car was a huge fiasco, and the programme was shut down after only having participated at Le Mans one single time.
CORE autosport will have team owner Jon Bennett and Colin Braun behind the wheel all season long, while Romain Dumas and Loic Duval once again will help out at some of the endurance rounds.
The team finished second in the IMSA Championship last year, when they still ran an ORECA 07 Gibson LMP2 car, which now has been swapped to a Nissan Onroak DPi racer, based on the Ligier LMP2 car, with a special bodykit, made for the IMSA series.
