Shank team embraces Honda cars

As the Michael Shank Racing team heads into the season opener, the Daytona 24-hour race starting Saturday afternoon, it has stepped down in class, but don’t let that fool you, the team owner said.

For two decades, Shank Racing has been known in sports car racing circles as the small team from Pataskala that could sometimes deliver huge results, with a win in the elite prototype division of the 2012 Daytona 24 hours serving as the prime example.

Headed into this year’s event, however, Shank is guiding a twocar effort in the lower GTD division, but those two cars are the Acura NSX GT3, the racing versions of the highend car produced in Marysville.

In short, Michael Shank Racing for the first time is a factory team.

“When you do this for a living, to get factory partnership is the ultimate goal,” Shank said this week. “And in any form, however that comes, we have to react to that. In this case I had a two-year relationship with Honda through the prototype (segment of the series the past two seasons), had a lot of success with it, understood this program was coming down the line, and we wanted to be a part of it.”

The Rahal Letterman Lanigan team based in Hilliard has had such an affiliation with BMW of North America for years and it continues in 2017. The team, whose principal owner is former IndyCar champion and Indianapolis 500 winner Bobby Rahal, will have two cars in the GTLM division of the Daytona 24.

Yet Rahal’s son Graham, a regular in the IndyCar series for his father’s team there, will be one of the co-drivers for Shank’s team this weekend. His affiliation with Honda, which powers the RLL IndyCar, made that happen. He was one of the first to take delivery of the new generation NSX last summer, chassis No. 15 to go with his IndyCar number.

“Having been a little bit involved in the development of the car originally … and now to get the first taste of the GT3 car in racing action at Daytona will be pretty cool,” Graham Rahal said.