Mike Shank is ready to come ashore.
Shank spent the weekend of the 2024 Rolex 24 at Daytona on a boat in Key West – his wife’s idea, he says – just to get away from the fact that he wasn’t there on a pit box. He still watched the race, but didn’t want to be at Daytona not participating. And it was painful.
“Floating was unnatural for now… I mean, I’m not young anymore, but I’m not old enough to retire yet either. So there are some more things we want to do,” Shank says.
And he and Meyer Shank Racing with Curb Agajanian will have the opportunity to do those things, something that wasn’t apparent in January 2024.
Most everyone knows the story of how that happened, but the Cliffs Notes version is the team got caught manipulating the tire pressure data that was sent to IMSA to make sure the teams were adhering to the minimum pressures set by the series and Michelin, during the 2023 Rolex 24 at Daytona, which MSR won. Discovered weeks later, the punishment for the infraction wasn’t that the team lost their victory. Tom Blomqvist, Colin Braun, Helio Castroneves and Simon Pagenaud got to keep their Rolexes. But they lost 200 points, ending with fewer than if they had finished last. For some, it wasn’t enough punishment, but it cost the team, and Blomqvist and Braun, the championship.
The bigger punishment was that at the end of the 2023 season, MSR no longer had a sports car team. Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti was now running two Acura ARX-06s when the fourth weekend in January rolled around. And Mike Shank was on a boat.
MSR won the 2023 Rolex 24 at Daytona but was subsequently found to have been manipulating tire pressure data – a scenario that cost it the championship, and for 2024, a sports car program. Motorsport Images
But MSR did have a sports car team, just no car. Shank kept his entire sports car crew on board, doing different things at the shop and with the IndyCar side of the operation. He knew he wanted to be back in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, with somebody. And that weekend on a boat in Key West only stoked the fire.
“It was pretty big,” he says of the way it drove him to make something happen. “I didn’t want to go out that way. We wanted to write history here a bit, and we’re going to, and we get that opportunity. I’m grateful for it and and I really put that on all the people that work at MSR, that just have an unwavering lust for winning and doing well and doing it the right way. It’s not always perfect, by the way … we obviously have our bumps and bruises to show it. But we push hard.”
The opportunity to write history, the prospect for another championship, the chance for that elusive Twelve Hours of Sebring victory… all that has come back to Shank and MSR. In 2025 the team will run not one, but two ARX-06s; the No. 60 will return, plus the No. 93 that will be engineered by Honda Racing Corporation personnel. If there’s a better redemption story, let us know what it is. And whatever negative things happened in the past, they’re outweighed by the success.
“What I think that says is that they they really appreciated how we went racing with them all those years, whether it was a P2 car, the NSX for four years with two championships, and then to DPi,” says Shank. “We have had this continuous relationship of giving on both sides and a workability between our groups, especially technically, that I think is hard to beat. I think that mattered at the end, the history.”
That history includes two GTD championships, the 2022 DPi championship, and coming back from the Daytona penalty to nearly win the inaugural new-era GTP title. With that record, is there any reason to change the approach? Perhaps, because the sport is changing, and the competition has only advanced.
“We’re going harder than we went before,” he says. “Technically… we’re doing more things technically than we’ve ever done in our lives. We have more people working for us than we’ve ever had, to do specific disciplines of sports car racing. They have their own department now, and that’s in a box, so we’ve had to compartmentalize that just to keep winning.
“That’s the pressure. We feel that’s all that matters on this side of the aisle here, in sports cars, we have to be up in the top three all the time. And if we’re not, then we need to do what we need to do to get there. I believe what it takes to be in the top three here now is 30 percent more, technically, than it was back then. And we are increasing our budget to be able to keep up with that demand for advancement in technology.”
There are some things that the sports car side can take from the IndyCar side as well. Nearly every IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship GTP team has an IndyCar team or a connection to one, and that’s not by accident. For Shank, his IndyCar team and the 2021 Indy 500 win with Castroneves doesn’t happen without his sports car racing roots. Now there are contributions to be made in the other direction.
“I always said sports cars is like peace and love, and IndyCar is like, militant,” he says. “It’s literally how it feels to me. And we’ve been able to blend, I believe the militant part. You need a militant part of it to be really good. And that’s something that Penske does well. It took us a little longer to get that, I think. But having both, I think we get it now. When I say ‘militant’, it means that we do the same thing every single time; we don’t deviate. And if there’s a problem, we go off the branch, then fix the problem, go back to the list.
Shank gives some of the credit for Helio’s fourth Indy win to the knowledge and experience MST built up on the sports car side. Barry Cantrell/Motorsport Images
“Sports car is a little slower paced, but the sports car side now is operating more along this military-like thing, which I think is a really good thing.”
The relationships with Honda Racing Corporation on the IndyCar side also kept the conversation going. Shank had every intention of adding to the 20 straight seasons he competed in IMSA, starting in 2004. And he wanted to stay in at the highest level, or not at all. There were talks with other manufacturers, but ultimately, the long relationship with HRC won out.
“I think the history of us together, in all ways, weighed into that,” he relates. “It’s results, it’s people, it’s compatibility, it’s everything you need to be successful at this high level nowadays, which is so advanced from five years ago or six years ago. I think they saw that we had the capability to grow with that technically, which is really important, which means we’re not stuck in our older ways of how the P2 car ran or the DPi car ran.
“As a group, and I struggle with it today, we’re going to be, between both programs, I think 100 people next year, when six years ago, we had 18. It’s hard for a lot of people, including myself, to expand. But I think Honda recognized that we reacted to that pretty well, and they trusted us that we would react to that, having experience with us, and that we’re ready to pursue results at Daytona next year.”
Shank says he doesn’t discount the size of the challenge ahead, coming back into a series that has grown, that has more eyes on it, that is getting more attention from commercial partners. He realizes the strides other teams have made. But he is confident in MSR’s readiness for the task.
“I know it’s gotten better. I know it’s advanced. That’s why we are advancing, right? We’re trying to come out of the box at speed and being able to compete in the top three,” he says. “That’s our goal right away, qualifying the top three and finishing the top three, and we have two cars at our disposal to get that done.”
And when the fourth weekend of January arrives, Mike Shank will be on a pit box at Daytona International Speedway. Somebody may be watching the race from a boat, but it won’t be him.
