- Mike Shank says Meyer Shank Racing has lost three people who did not want to switch from IMSA to IndyCar, per RACER.
- Shank is keeping the IMSA staff who want to stay, contractors and paid employees alike, and has plenty of work waiting for them.
- Shank hopes to keep the engineering partnership with Chip Ganassi Racing alive as a third IndyCar entry arrives in 2028.
A Team Owner Counts Heads After Closing the Sports Car Chapter
“We’ve lost three people that just didn’t want to do IndyCar, which is totally fine.”
That is how Shank sums up the human cost of the reshuffle that follows the end of the IMSA effort. The IMSA season is over, the Acura GTP program the team led is a former effort, and the people who ran it have a new job description. Shank sees the departures as a reset. “I actually see it as a positive,” he said.
The way he tells it, the weeks after the final IMSA race have been a long run of planning. “Tons of meetings” is how he describes them. The new car and equipment have not arrived, so planning is the job for now. Shank says the team is arranging its people, shuffling some of them into new roles and getting ready for the day the hardware shows up.
Shank is open about what that means for hiring. He would still add specialists who are strong at particular jobs, and he did not rule out going after someone good from another team if the chance came. His preference is to start from the inside. “Time will tell,” he said, and he likes the idea of making the team stronger with the people already in the building.
Keeping the People Who Want to Stay
The staff in question come from the IMSA program of a team that Jim Meyer and Shank joined forces to run in 2018. Some are paid employees and some are contractors, and Shank counts both groups. “We’ve got really good people on that IMSA program, whether you’re a contractor or a paid employee,” he said. His promise is simple: “keeping the people that want to stay.”
He also has work for them. Most of it is preparation for the next IndyCar chassis, which the team will test and race in a third entry in 2028. “We’re making new stuff for the new car,” Shank said, and he pointed to the fixtures the shop has to build before testing can start.
When Shank spoke in September, the team had already decided to use 2027 to build toward that third car, which carries a Honda manufacturer charter. He also said then that all of his IMSA people would be under one roof, so the team could still pivot and run a program if one came along. The Pataskala, Ohio, shop is set to expand to hold whatever the team adds next, whether that is a return to IMSA or an entry in Indy NXT.
For the people who stayed, the pitch is stability. In September Shank said that many of the people who work for the team have been with him for 20 years, and that he values that.
Three Titles, Twenty One Wins and One Very Bad Weekend
It is easy to forget how much the IMSA side of the operation achieved before it stopped. Meyer Shank Racing leaves the series with three WeatherTech SportsCar Championship titles, two in GTD in 2019 and 2020 and one in the former top class, DPi, in 2022. The team also won 21 IMSA races, including three overall victories at the Rolex 24 At Daytona in 2012, 2022 and 2023. A total of 75 drivers took part in those wins across Grand-Am and the unified IMSA era.
Shank did not hide that the story had a dark chapter. Post-race penalties after the 2023 Rolex 24 sidelined the team for the 2024 season. He said in September that what happened at Daytona was “not a lot of fun,” called it the low light of the program and said it hurt. The owner also took responsibility. “I took my lumps,” he said, and the team came back strong.
That makes the current pause the second time in four years that the sports car program has gone quiet. The first was forced on the team. This one is a choice. Offers came in, two or three of them, along with options to race GT3 cars or run LMP2. None of them held enough interest for Shank, who also had a clear view of where the team belongs. “I feel like we’ve paid our dues in IMSA, and I think we deserve to be at the top end,” he said.
He was just as clear about his own stage of life. Shank described himself as deep into his 50s and said that if the team could not be at the top end of sports car racing, he did not want to do it. He wants to stay with a manufacturer partner and race at the highest level the team can reach. The door to IMSA is open as soon as 2028, though only with a manufacturer behind it.
Before the Petit Le Mans finale, he also made a promise to the team. After a team party, he said he told his people “we have to go out on top,” and that one of the cars needed to be at the top of the podium. It did not play out that way: Porsche Penske Motorsport won the October 3 finale, with BMW second and a Cadillac third.
The Ganassi Question
The harder puzzle is on the IndyCar side. Meyer Shank Racing debuted in the series in 2017 and has relied on technical alliances from the start. The most recent partner is Chip Ganassi Racing, and employees from that team work as the race engineers for MSR’s full-time cars. In IMSA, the setup ran differently. MSR handled the engineering on its No. 60 Acura in house, while the sister No. 93 car was led by Honda Racing Corporation U.S. staff, who were responsible for engineering and race strategy.
With three Dallara IR28 cars arriving in 2028, MSR, Ganassi and HRC will have to decide who engineers the two team cars and who handles the Honda entry numbered 93. That car could follow the GTP model and lean on the HRC technical group.
Shank says the talks are active. “We are working on that now,” he said. The current deal runs another year. “We have a another year deal with Chip, which is great,” Shank said. He and Ganassi have preferred short agreements to keep their options open. “One thing Chip has taught me is, it’s crazy how fast things change,” Shank said.
He wants the arrangement to last and admits there is a plan B. If it is not in the cards, or if either team’s world changes, MSR will pivot. The 93 car will run as the 93 car no matter what, so the question is how everyone stays happy with the intellectual property. Shank calls it a tricky position. Even so, the answer he wants is plain. “My hope is that we can stay together with Chip. That’s my hope.”
What 2027 and 2028 Look Like
The drivers are set. Mick Schumacher moves from Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing to Meyer Shank Racing for 2027, and he is paired with Marcus Armstrong, who recently signed a new contract. Armstrong moves to the No. 60 entry that Felix Rosenqvist drove for the past three seasons. The team lists as Meyer Shank Racing with Curb Agajanian on the 2027 entry list.
The season opens Sunday, March 7, with the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, the first of 17 races, all of them live on FOX. Over at Chip Ganassi Racing, the team that supplies MSR’s engineers, Christian Lundgaard has taken Scott Dixon’s seat, part of the driver changes across the field.
An Owner Who Knows What the Big Day Feels Like
Shank has been to the top of the sport. Helio Castroneves won the 2021 Indianapolis 500 in a Meyer Shank Racing entry, the first IndyCar series win in the team’s history. “I don’t even know where to start,” Shank said that day. It came four years after the team’s series debut in 2017.
Now the shop in Ohio is organized around the next big day. The rest of the crew is in place and has work to do, with a new car to prepare for and a third entry to launch. The job of this crew is to build Mick Schumacher and Armstrong cars worth driving. Shank has said he hopes the IMSA chapter is only paused, and if it is not, it is not. The next chapter is about three IndyCar cars and the people who build them.
