Cadillac Chip Ganassi Racing has announced their plans prior to the 2022 season in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
Renger van der Zande and Sebastien Bourdais will be sharing Cadillac DPi-V.R #01 for the full 2022 season. They will get extra help for the 24 hours by no other than Scott Dixon and Alex Palou, with a total of seven Indycar titles, on top of the four Champcar titles by Bourdais. That makes van der Zande the “weak link” with “only” race wins, but not US titles on his CV so far.
Car #02 will have Earl Bamber and Alex Lynn as full-season drivers. They will have another Indycar driver join them, in the shape of Marcus Ericsson. That will be the Daytona and sportscar debut for Ericsson. The Swede has tested the DPi car throughout 2021, and has been on standby, in case one of the regular drivers should be hit by COVID-19. But now things get real at Daytona.
Photo Courtesy of IMSA / Jake Galstad
The last driver onboard #02 will be Kevin Magnussen. Magnussen was a teammate with van der Zande in #01 throughout 2021, but missed the final race of the race, since he fell sick during the race week. He was replaced by Earl Bamber, who was at the track anyway. Magnussen had actually called an end to his USA trip following the 2021 season, after he signed with Peugeot Sport for their FIA WEC programme, but since Peugeot don’t have a car race-ready just yet, he was allowed to race for CGR again at Daytona. There might be a chance for Sebring two, since his Peugeot teammate Mikkel Jensen has been given a weekend off to race LMP2 in IMSA that weekend, plus Dixon, Palou and Ericsson all will do Indycar on that same weekend. So there might be a slight opening for him, but it’s not yet officially announced by the team.
The eight drivers will be testing in two weeks time, with the test being run one week prior to the 24 hours race itself, which will run on 29-30 January 2022.
