Photo: SRO
TC America presented by Skip Barber Racing School will remain a standalone series next year despite an initial proposal from SRO America to have it be absorbed within GT America powered by AWS races.
Announced during Friday’s annual ‘State of the Sport’ address at Road America, SRO America President and CEO Greg Gill confirmed changes to TC America’s format that will consist of two-to-three 25-minute races per weekend.
This compares to the current pair of 40-minute races.
Additionally, the TCX and TC classes will be combined into a single TC division, with TCA set to be discontinued at the end of this season.
Additionally, the series will be packed into a Thursday through Saturday weekend schedule.
Speaking with Sportscar365, Gill revealed they changed course on an initial idea to combine the touring cars into the GT America field, a proposal that had been communicated to teams at Virginia International Raceway last month.
This concept was made due to decreased available track time with the launch of the McLaren Trophy Americas series, which will race on five SRO America weekends next year.
“The initial idea was, with the 19 cars in GTA and the 15-17 cars in TC, ‘Let’s run them together, in classic World Challenge,’” said Gill.
“There were people like James Sofronas that said, ‘Wow! Cool! Classic World Challenge.’
“But what we also heard from TC guys saying, ‘We really want our own show. We want our own aspect of what we do. That’s important. Is there anything you can do to help us out, to work with us?’
“And you had people on the GT side of things saying, ‘This is GT racing. We signed up in GTA to be part of GT racing. Can you look at this?’
“Ultimately what drove it was a safety discussion. We looked at the speed variables and we looked at the size of vehicles and looked at the tracks and said, ‘At this time, we think it makes more sense to run them separate.’”
Gill said the reduced race length will allow them to keep TC America as a standalone series, with the triple-header weekends likely to occur on weekends where the McLaren Trophy is not in action.
While the TCA class is set to go away at seasons’ end, Sportscar365 understands that at least two new car models, including a Toyota Corolla, are set to become eligible in the series’ newly combined TC category next year.
John Dagys is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sportscar365. Dagys spent eight years as a motorsports correspondent for FOXSports.com and SPEED Channel and has contributed to numerous other motorsports publications worldwide. Contact John
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Publish date : 2024-08-16 05:58:00
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