Two races remain in the 2026 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season, and Acura Meyer Shank Racing is bringing both of its ARX-06 GTPs to Indianapolis Motor Speedway with a title gap to close. The TireRack.com Battle on the Bricks runs Sunday, September 20, live on NBC at 3 PM ET, with streaming on Peacock.
The race returns to its original two-hour, 40-minute format after two years as a six-hour endurance event. That compressed window tightens strategy margins considerably, and it suits the urgency of Acura’s situation: the #93 of Nick Yelloly and Renger van der Zande sits second in the teams’ championship with little room for a patient race.
Yelloly knows the Indianapolis road course well. He finished third there in 2023 and second in 2024, making him the most experienced IMS road course driver in the Acura stable. He and van der Zande already have a 2026 race win on the books, taking the victory at the Long Beach Grand Prix earlier this season. Since then, however, the #93 has been catching bad luck in concentrated doses: a torque shaft sensor failure at Road America cost them most of their power output for the bulk of that six-hour race, and a subsequent speeding penalty dropped them further before they salvaged fourth.
Tom Blomqvist and Colin Braun in the #60 are hunting their first podium of 2026, having posted fourth-place results at both Sebring and Laguna Seca. Their only IMS podium came last year, a third-place finish that remains Acura’s lone podium result since the race returned to the IMS road course in 2023. Blomqvist qualified second at Road America in August, completing an all-Acura front row for the third consecutive year at that circuit, though the team came away without a win.
The broader context for this weekend is that the ARX-06 program ends after the 2026 season. Indianapolis is one of the final opportunities for the hybrid GTP machine to add to its results sheet before Acura shuts the program down. A win at IMS, where the team has yet to stand on the top step, would be a meaningful note to close on. The #93 needs points more than headlines, but in a short race those two things tend to align.
Acura has not announced what comes after the ARX-06, and with two races left, that question is someone else’s problem for now. The one on the table is whether Yelloly and van der Zande can hold second in the championship through Indianapolis and the finale.
Source: Acura. Images courtesy of Acura.
