CORE autosport has chosen to buy a new race car, for the upcoming IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season.
They send out a press release earlier this fall, that they would continue with their LMP2 ORECA for the 2019 season, but now they have bought a Nissan Onroak DPi car.
Colin Braun and Jon Bennett will once again be the full season drivers of the #54 car. Romain Dumas will help the team during all the NAEC rounds, while Loic Duval will be the fourth driver at Daytona 24 Hours in January.
The car model was previously run by Extreme Speed Motorsports, but it looks less and less likely to be on the entry list, after they lost their title sponsor. There are only two Nissan DPi cars in existence, so it appears that CORE autosport has bought one if not both cars from ESM.
Braun and Bennett were oh-so-close to winning the Prototype Championship in the 2018 IMSA season, but just lost out at the very final round at Road Atlanta. Bennett is the silver ranked driver for the team, but with clever pit strategy from Jeff Braun, who by the way is the father of Colin, they still managed to fight for the victories during the second half of the season.
The DPi teams were so annoyed of the much cheaper LMP2 car being able to challenge, and sometimes even run away from the works teams, so they forsed IMSA to changing the rules, so the DPi cars will have their own category from 2019 onwards, while the LMP2 category will become Pro-Am, and will the running a bit slower laptimes than the DPi cars.
But with Braun and Bennett arriving in the top category, they might be able to utilize the same tactics again. With them running a different chassis than the majority of the DPi field, could very well prove to be an advantage, when the BOP between the chassis’s will be determined.
The 2019 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season will start at Daytona on 26-27 January.