Acura currently fields two works teams in the IMSA SportsCar Championship – Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti Autosport and Meyer Shank Racing – and they benefit from having factory Honda Performance Development engineers embedded in their single-car programs.
The GTP class cars feature a common electrical hybrid system that has proved problematic to incorporate due to open software rules, and these have led to many malfunctions that require resetting and system failures.
Although he hasn’t ruled out the LMDh car being sold to customers in the longer term, Salters said there won’t be any of the Daytona 24 Hours-winning machines in private hands any time soon – unlike Porsche, which begins its 963 customer team operations with JDC-Miller MotorSports this weekend at Laguna Seca.
“Right now, in my opinion, this is a works-level car,” said Salters of the ARX-06. “In the future, it could possibly transition to customer stuff, but I personally think that’s some years away. And we need to keep evaluating that. That said, there are some very good so-called customer teams.”
He then quipped: “Even we’ve struggled to run this car! So, giving it to a customer would be a whole world of pain, so at the moment no. It could change in the future, but right now we’ve got to make sure we do a good job and do our best job for Acura.”
Source: Autosport