IMSA GTO Comes To Project Motor Racing

October 21, 2025

Days Of Our Lives

By the late 1980s, IMSA GTO (Grand Touring Over 2.5L) had become America’s loudest GT arms race featuring a dayglo cast of tube-frame silhouettes with massive bodywork, colossal turbos, grunting V8s and stern factory muscle all mixed in with thunder, flares, and a rulebook on the absolute ragged edge of sanity.

This unhinged moment in motorsport is coming to Project Motor Racing.

The Cast Of The Bold & The Beautiful (so far)

• Roush Mercury Cougar XR-7: Detroit thunder with Trans-Am DNA that won GTO overall at Daytona ’89 which then anchored a title push. Driver Pete Halsmer topped the 1989 GTO Drivers’ Championship.
• 1989 Chevrolet Camaro Z28 IMSA GTO: A tube-frame, wide-arched silhouette Camaro with a thumping small-block V8 and side-exit dragons of fury. Built for curb-smashing grip and straight-line punch, it brought classic American muscle to GTO grids with box-flares, big torque, and crowd-pleasing noise. Always in the mix as a podium-threat bruiser of the late ’80s.
• Audi 90 quattro IMSA GTO (1989): A spaceframe sedan with a 700–720 hp turbo inline-five and AWD. Wild tech and wilder stance and it blitzed multiple road courses and stacked wins like dishes. Only skipping Daytona and Sebring cost Audi the title.
• Mazda RX-7: Import firepower that kept pressure high and set the stage for early-’90s success, with cars and teams appearing regularly at the sharp end. The Mazda came with its 4-rotor spec that was closely related in concept to the R26B 4-rotor that would power the 1991 Le Mans-winning 787B.

The Young & The Restless

GTO’s late-’80s aesthetic was as distinctive as ’80s fashion. Imagine Group B insanity crashing onto a GT grid in the US: massive box-arches, snorkel hoods, fire-spitting side-exit exhausts, and ground-hugging splitters. Think Camaro and Cougar silhouettes hammering curbs and the epic Audi 90 firing off corners with quattro traction. Power figures wandered off north of 700 bhp at the exotic end, while the Roush V8s embodied the big-cube, big-torque ethos of Detroit. And sandwiched in-between was the eternal buzzing of rotary-engine RPM.

Another World

Late-’80s GTO distilled a uniquely American flavour on GT racing: factory-backed innovation on tube frames, noise you felt in your sternum, and a literal carpark of shapes and colour—from muscle coupes to four-door Audis—duking it out on legendary US tracks.

The class’s tech brinkmanship (AWD sedans vs. big-V8 coupes vs. turbo imports) and calendar variety made it as wild as it was unpredictable and set the tone for the GTS realignment that followed in the ’90s.

No modern aids. Just point-and-squirt ’em and hope for the best. You up to taming some actual beasts?

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