The long road to convergence for sportscar racing's new golden age

It was a historic moment. The great and good from the Automobile Club de l’Ouest and IMSA sat on stage and told the racing world what it had wanted to hear for years: that the same cars would battle it out for the overall victory at the Le Mans and Daytona 24-hour endurance classics and right across the two series. An announcement, you might think, deserving of a 21-gun salute from the National Guard or a ticker tape parade through the streets.

Yet for all the euphoria on the eve of the 2020 Daytona 24 Hours when the convergence between the top-class prototype rules of the two governing bodies was revealed it was just a staging point – perhaps a flag-in-the-sand moment – on a long and winding road. There was still work to be done to align what was now being called LMDh, the category that had grown out of IMSA’s vision for a successor to the Daytona Prototype international class, and the Le Mans Hypercar rules of the ACO and the FIA. It would be another 18 months or more before sportscar racing nirvana, on the verge of which we now stand, was achieved.