Massive bhp and minimal downforce — the revival of Trans Am racing

Ask a baby boomer about Trans-Am racing, and he’ll talk your ear off about Mark Donohue, Parnelli Jones and production-based Mustang and Camaro pony cars. Ask a Gen Xer,  and he’ll regale you with tales about Willy T. Ribbs, Tommy Kendall and tube-frame chassis with silhouette bodies resembling Corvettes and XR4Tis. Ask a millennial, and –

Wait a sec. Trans-Am is still around?

Hell, yes. Now billing itself as “America’s Road Racing Series,” the Trans Am (sans hyphen these days) championship presented by Pirelli (supplier of the spec tires) offers some of the best racing on the planet. In fact, the top-of-the-line TA cars are the answers to the pleas that fans have been making for decades to the largely unresponsive powers that be.

“They’re the best cars I’ve ever raced. They’re old school.”

Massive amounts of horsepower? Check. Minimal levels of downforce? Check. Limited driver aids? Check. Plenty of overtaking without contrivances like DRS or push-to-pass? Check. Bitchin’ bodywork, gnarly noises and kick-ass racecourses? Check, check, and check.

“The cars are phenomenal,” says Chris Dyson, a second-generation racer who’s won championships in prototypes and who also races hairy-chested sprint cars on dirt tracks. “They’re throwbacks to an age when cars had more power than grip and the driver was the ultimate differentiator. Trans Am represents the essence of racing as I knew it growing up, which is the driver as the central player in taming the beast.”

Another Trans Am proselytizer is former Trans-Am champion Boris Said, whose resume ranges from showroom stock to Daytona prototypes, with some noteworthy forays into hulking NASCAR stock cars. “They’re the best cars I’ve ever raced,” he says. “They’re old school. The one I run has a gated shifter. I don’t have any ABS, and I don’t have any traction control. But they have 860 horsepower, and they weigh only 2600 pounds, so they just fly.”

Trans Am offers a cost-effective alternative to the ultra-expensive factory-built cars marketed through customer-racing programs. Based on tube-frame chassis and honking American pushrod V-8s, the cars will run with much more sophisticated – and far pricier – GT3 thoroughbreds that are sold by manufacturers as turnkey products. But they’re still struggling to find an audience comparable to the ones the series commanded during its glory years.

The first race of what was then known as the Trans-American Sedan Championship, at Sebring in 1966, was won by future Formula 1 World Champion Jochen Rindt, with Over 2.0-litre class honours going to Bob Tullius, of Group 44 fame. But the series quickly became synonymous with factory-backed pony cars. There was also a 2.5-litre championship, famously won by John Morton in a funky BRE Datsun 510.

Trans-Am’s profile rose and fell over the next three decades, depending on the participation – or lack thereof – of car manufacturers ranging from General Motors to Audi. But by 2006, the factories had disappeared, and so had most of the competitors. The entire schedule consisted of two races. At the end of the “season,” the series was euthanized.

But ground-pounding V-8-powered door-slammers never went out of style. So in 2009, SCCA Pro Racing revived Trans Am, based on club-racing GT-1 rules. Two years later, a new management team took over under the Trans Am Race Company banner. In 2017, controlling interest in the series was bought by Tony Parella, an enthusiast who already owned the SVRA vintage-racing organization.