Ben Barnicoat desires an IMSA race on the streets of Arlington

Ben Barnicoat would like to see a few tweaks made to the IMSA schedule in the future, including a race on the streets of Arlington.

When IMSA revealed its 2027 schedule last week ahead of the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring, the most significant change for the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship was planned series-sanctioned testing at venues that host the endurance rounds.

“Yeah, it’s a huge help,” said Barnicoat, 29. “Preparation’s everything. It’s definitely a huge benefit. The good thing about the IMSA-sanctioned tests is that they don’t come from your private testing allocation. So if they test for all of those long endurance races, it then gives us the opportunity to go and test all the sprint tracks if we wish to, providing the rules don’t change.

“Obviously, I’m not sure what the regulation’s going to look like. Well, if they do or they don’t, it still gives you the opportunity to kind of, I feel, be better prepared, and it will definitely help with the tire allocation.”

For the most part, Barnicoat was upbeat about the consistency of next year’s calendar, with IMSA returning to all the same tracks with nearly identical race dates. However, he wouldn’t mind seeing GTD Pro, the class he competes in with Vasser Sullivan, returning to the Grand Prix of Long Beach for the first time since 2023.

“Listen, I think the schedule is great,” said Barnicoat, who has two class wins (including a GTD win in 2024) and a runner-up in three starts at Long Beach.

“I’d love for GTD Pro to be back at Long Beach. It’s my favorite track, or one of my favorite tracks.”

The Brit was also in awe of watching the IndyCar Series take on the streets of Arlington for the first time two weekends ago, and believes IMSA should press to be on the card at the 2.73-mile, 14-turn temporary street circuit.

“And my final point to the schedule is Arlington looks like an amazing race for the Indy cars, so I think there should be a big push to get IMSA to pass that show,” Barnicoat said. “I think sports cars would race really well there. It’s an awesome venue, and I think it looks like a perfect place to grow motorsports in general.”

Barnicoat also has a different perspective than most on Arlington, considering that, along with full-time co-driver Jack Hawksworth, he shares the #14 Lexus RC F GT3 for the endurance rounds with IndyCar star – and the event’s inaugural race winner – Kyle Kirkwood.

“I’m not sure if I’d go all four classes,” Barnicoat said. “You maybe could. That’s probably a bit too much for the streets though, but I think you could go three, like 2022, 2023, my first two years at Long Beach. That was prototypes, GTD, and GTD Pro. You could certainly do that. It’s obviously a long track.

“It’s also very wide in spots, so that makes it easy for the prototypes to come past us. So I definitely think that’s doable, and the venue certainly had space to fit everyone in there as well in terms of a logistics point of view with the haulers and stuff like that. So I think it’d be a huge opportunity for the series.

“Kyle was there, obviously he ran great, so it’d be good for us to get a bit of good information on how to go fast around the place. He was on fire there, no one was touching him. I had that opinion from the first laps of practice I watched. I was like, ‘This place looks awesome.’

“As a driver, you always want to go and challenge yourself on the best tracks in the world, and I think that’s slotted in pretty high.”

AT&T Stadium at the epicenter of the Grand Prix of Arlington

Photo by: Penske Entertainment

The idea of adding Arlington would come at the cost of another race, though, with IMSA President John Doonan previously stating an 11-race schedule is likely the max. So, what race should it replace?

“The new Detroit,” Barnicoat said.

“The market matters but also, we’re here to race, and racing should be pure, it should be fun. It should be exciting. There wasn’t a driver who got out of their car and said that track (in Arlington) was boring, whereas I think if you ask us all our honest opinion of Detroit, it’s probably not going to be the same as that.

“I just think it’d be a good place to, and it’s the home of Toyota, of Lexus, so it’d be a home race for us.”

We want your opinion!

– The Motorsport.com Team

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: motorsport.com