Imsa

In this behind the scenes book, Mitch Bishop and Mark Raffauf tell the inside story of how IMSA became a global powerhouse in just a few short years. It covers John Bishop's early life, his years at the SCCA and tells the story of how IMSA grew from humble beginnings in 1969 into the Camel GT Series, a circuit that became the most popular form of professional sports car racing in the world. This book is a must-read, for those interested in how it all happened and in learning critical management lessons still applicable in today's motor racing world.

Professional automobile racing has always been dominated by sanctioning bodies whose main goal was to ensure competition. That has meant seeing that cars are well matched--in body shape or chassis/engine combinations or engine size. But what about an all-out competition, in which one team's idea of the fastest race car could be pitted against another’s, regardless of mechanical “parity”? This was what the International Motor Sports Association’s (IMSA) Grand Touring Prototypes (GTP) race series was about. The Series ran from 1981 to 1993, and it was one of the most exhilarating racing experiences of all time. This book is the first to profile the amazing machines that resulted from the GTP’s flat-out competition among different--and passionate--ideas about what might be the fastest way around a track: the V-12 with its better ground-effect tunnels but higher center of gravity (CG); the flat six with its low CG but severely-restricted ground-effect tunnels; and others that employed elaborate wings and air dams. Here are the people behind this engineering free-for-all, the culmination of almost a century of automobile racing experience. And here are eighteen of the most competitive vehicles they designed. Using photography, diagrams, drawings and first-person accounts from the men who built them, Inside IMSA's Legendary GTP Race Cars offers a detailed look at the technology that drove some of the world’s most exciting race cars, the likes of which may never be seen again.

In the months following Pearl Harbor, an area of swampy land north of Portland, Oregon, was transformed into shipyard housing, and within six months, Vanport became the fifth-largest city in Oregon. But in 1948, the Columbia River levees burst, and the entire town was washed away. When the waters receded, only the streets of the town remained. Throughout the 1950s, these streets were known for clandestine racing. In the spring of 1961, the Portland Rose Festival Association and Cascade Sports Car Club decided to hold a sports car race on the old blacktop. The Rose Cup races established the viability of West Delta Park as a road racing circuit. Over time, the track was improved and extended by the local racing community, and its name soon changed to Portland International Raceway (PIR). What followed was the development of the only major road racing circuit located inside the borders of a major American city. Trans-Am, IMSA, CART, Champ Car, ALMS, and, of course, NASCAR have all raced at PIR, and the Rose Cup is going strong into its sixth decade.