SEBRING, Fla—To the great delight of sports car racing fans, the relief of sports car racing teams, the International Motor Sports Association, owner of the WeatherTech Sports Car Championship, has decided to revive the February test days at Sebring Raceway.
The winter test days, which for years had filled the void between the Rolex 24 and the Twelve Hours of Sebring, got dropped in 2014 in the merger of the American Le Mans Series and the Rolex Sports Car series which gave rise to WSCC, probably in part as a cost-saving measure for teams forced to upgrade equipment to met the regulations of the then-new series.
Two years in, with the series successful, IMSA has decided to revive the four day February test session—probably after seeing that teams were on sound financial footing, end even more so because IMSA management realized that test data collected at Daytona International Speedway’s banked oval was just about useless for the teams or the series for determining how to run the cars at every other track on the schedule.
IMSA has been improving the Weathertech Championship steadily since its 2014 debut, and this latest addition is very large improvement. WSCC cars and teams will now know how their cars perform on a real road course—the most demanding road course on the schedule. If the cars work at Sebring, they will work everywhere else the series goes.
This year the test ran from Tuesday, Feb. 23–Friday, Feb. 26. The test is divided in half, with two days devoted to support series (CTSCC, Porsche GT3 Cup, Prototype Lites) and two for the WSCC cars. The track was closed to the public for the first two days, and open for the WSCC sessions, with tickets costing $10.
