Meyer Shank Racing, which won the prestigious 24 Hours of Daytona race in January, has been punished because it lied to IMSA about the tire pressure during the race. The team’s owner, Mike Shank, has been put on probation, lost 200 points in the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, and one engineer has been placed on indefinite leave. The team will keep the trophy and be considered the real winner of the race, while the drivers will get to keep the Rolex watches they won. When the green flag went up for the final restart of the 2023 24 Hours of Daytona, the No. 60 Meyer Shank Racing Acura ARX-06 raced ahead and won by just over four seconds. But now that it has been discovered that Meyer Shank Racing lied about tire pressure data during the race, the team is in trouble, and IMSA has given it harsh punishments. Honda Performance Development (HPD), which works closely with teams that operate top-tier Acura GTP race cars, discovered anomalies in the data of the No. 60 after the race and launched an investigation. In other words, the team lied about the tire pressure so that the numbers they gave to IMSA were higher than the pressures they were running. Meyer Shank Racing was found to have made “intentional software offsets” in the tire pressures reported by the monitoring system. Meyer Shank Racing could run its tires with lower pressures than the minimums set by Michelin. This may have helped the car’s grip when accelerating or turning. Michelin is the company that makes the tires for the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. As a result of HPD’s discovery, the No. 60 team and its four drivers—Tom Blomqvist, Colin Braun, Helio Castroneves, and Simon Pagenaud—were docked 200 of the 350 points they had accumulated during the full-season WeatherTech Championship competition. Also, they lost all their issues in the Michelin Endurance Cup for races that lasted at least six hours. The team and drivers will also have to pay a fine of $50,000 and give back the prizes they won at the 24 Hours of Daytona. The team’s owner, Mike Shank, is on probation until June 30, and engineer Ryan McCarthy has lost his IMSA license and is suspended until further notice. The race’s official results still say that the No. 60 team won. The team gets the trophy, and the four drivers get the Rolex watches that were given as prizes. The Meyer Shank Racing team said, “We accept the series’ decision and have taken responsibility.” The team went on to say that the mistake was caused by a “team member who is no longer with the organization” and that they “don’t want this mistake to take away from the incredible work that our team, drivers, and all of our partners have put into developing this new LMDh car.” This shows that McCarthy messed with the data on his own and that the crew didn’t work together to break the law on purpose to win the race. In a statement, HPD president David Salters said, “We are deeply disappointed in the behavior of the Meyer Shank Racing (MSR) team.” He also said it was “unacceptable” that two years of work on the ARX-06 had been called into question.
