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The bigger story behind Acura’s Detroit IMSA breakthrough

Renger van der Zande’s last-gasp diving overtake for victory – he’s got somewhat of a reputation for that – stole the headlines in IMSA’s latest race at Detroit.

He says he “lost it like a little child” when he made the overtake and he was worried he was going to “cause a pile up”, but ultimately he delivered the No.93 car its first win of the season. It’s the first car to win from pole since July 2023, but it couldn’t have been any less straightforward than what a win from pole usually looks like.

Now the dust has settled and the adrenaline has dissipated, we can look in more depth and detail at what this result means for a program that was turned on its head in the off-season.

A return to Meyer Shank was the first change for Acura as a whole, but having worked together before, that was more of a rekindling of an old friendship.

What was basically unheard of for Acura and Honda’s racing arm, HRC, was engineering one of the cars in-house. All of the factory teams in IMSA have separate teams which run the cars, with varying levels of autonomy, and this was a new step for Honda. You can read more on Honda’s change with RACER here.

The No.93 car winning its first race – a repeat win from when Wayne Taylor ran the car to victory on the Michigan streets last year – is a massive achievement given this uprooting.

So, what is the breakthrough that has allowed Honda to make the step, not only to take just five races to get its first win in this set-up, but also be the first manufacturer to stop the Porsche juggernaut which had won every race up until this point in 2025?

“The biggest thing that has changed is we’re more of a team,” David Salters, president of HRC, tells RACER.

“I’ve been doing this for a while now. The key to it is having a team of people who work together well, the right people in the right places, going in the right direction. You’ve got to get that team to sort of… bond. 

“That is probably the process that we’ve been going through and we’re starting to enjoy the fruits of now.

“There’s been a s***load of work. So people have worked incredibly hard, 20 hours a day, six, seven days a week, putting all this stuff together for at le ast the last seven, eight months. But then the team is starting to come together and we were starting to figure out what we don’t know.”

It’s true that Porsche and BMW – which was on pole for every race until the No.93 ended that streak, too – had taken big Balance of Performance hits prior to Detroit. But to attribute Acura’s win to that alone would be shortsighted.

As van der Zande pointed out, “on raw speed, there was no chance”, but in IMSA, it’s never about just the speed of the car. Navigating traffic, getting your strategy perfect, perfect pitstops, avoiding penalties and two-four drivers delivering elite performances without mistakes, might just give you a

chance at a win.

The bar has been raised so high by elite teams gaining experience in all of these areas, and since these cars came in for 2023, the teams have had time to engineer the weaknesses out of the cars so that they are all in a very similar window. The calendar has remained relatively unchanged in this period, too.

No doubt it was van der Zande who made the difference in the closing stages in Detroit. But the Acura driver line-up has been a big part of building towards this success. While this feature is focused on the No.93 car, Tom Blomqvist especially has put in some really impressive drives in the No.60 sister car alongside Colin Braun.

Teamwork is helping to make the dream work when it comes to HRC’s No.93 Acura. Mike Levitt/IMSA

Part of the reason the balance is so good on the No.93 is that Yelloly brings his experience of toiling in F1 simulators into the early hours and his excellent analytical insight, while van der Zande’s racecraft and ability to make extremely high-risk moves work especially in the closing stages of races for wins is almost unmatched in IMSA.

That’s not to say van der Zande isn’t analytical, and that Yelloly doesn’t have impressive race craft. They just both have standout attributes and they complement each other excellently.

This was Yelloly’s first IMSA GTP win on the road, while van der Zande has 22 wins in 119 starts.

It was fitting that while van der Zande was being asked about his barnstorming overtake, one of Yelloly’s first comments after the race was to ask if his team got the strategy right, that he was overcut in the pit sequence which was not “ideal”, before praising his team-mates “stonking” moves.

Salters, who spent a lot of time with his team analyzing drivers before bringing in two drivers it hadn’t worked with on the IMSA side in GTP before, called it “delightful” working with them.

“I think between Nick and Renger, we get this lovely balance also of deep understanding of the car, analytical approach, and then racecraft and just the fight to win. So from a personal point of view, it’s been delightful.”

We’ve only just passed the halfway point of the season, incredibly. The No.93 car trails the leading No.7 Porsche – in a team Salters says is operating on a “humbling and inspirational” level and “that helps motivate us, that’s where we need to get to and get past” – is 314 points clear in the standings.

With the IMSA points system, that’s somewhere around two wins, with the No.7 finishing last twice. Meaning it’s still a massive gap, in reality.

So what does Salters reckon is possible for the rest of the season?

“You’re asking me to put the kiss of death on it now aren’t you?!” he laughs.

“I think there’s a lot to play for. We’ve got a chance to be competitive. We’ve got to make sure we’re optimizing the car, as always. 

“The way to do this is race by race. So we’re figuring out what we learned now from Detroit. Funny enough, I’d just come out of a strategy debrief where we debated all our strategies; what do we do a bit better? And then we learn.

“The standard of the competition is incredibly high, so you can’t afford to slip up anywhere.”

Last year, Acura didn’t win again after Detroit, but that was with a different team and without Honda burning the candle at both ends to get its own No.93 crew up to speed like it has this year.

Even without the best car, it won in Detroit. So if it keeps executing to the same standard as it did there, there’s no reason it can’t put some more wins together on route to a title push.

It will likely need both Porsches to have issues first, though.

Perhaps the fact that Honda’s sportscar personnel don’t have to go through the Le Mans 24 Hours and has a relative sportscar break will give it more energy to hit the ground running in Watkins Glen, where it’s back to endurance racing.