Ten years of Acura prototype racing in IMSA ended today at Road Atlanta in about the most complicated way imaginable. The #60 Acura ARX-06 led from pole, fought for a podium all afternoon, and got demoted to sixth on the final lap when a splash of fuel burned a position that had been earned the hard way. The #93, which started second, took damage through a string of midrace incidents and eventually retired with just under three hours left, classified 10th.
That result tells maybe a third of the story. Renger van der Zande, Nick Yelloly, and Alex Palou had kept the #93 solidly enough in the points picture across the 2026 season that today’s 10th still locked up second in the IMSA team championship. Yelloly and van der Zande take third in the drivers’ title. Acura finishes third in the manufacturer standings. None of that was decided today in a vacuum.
The season’s high point came in April, when the #93 won at Long Beach, Acura’s first victory at the event since the brand took over title sponsorship of the race. That win arrived just days before Honda announced it was pausing the GTP program, a decision tied to the company’s broader EV retreat and a challenging global market. The timing made an already meaningful result feel like punctuation on the whole era.
The ARX-06 era, which opened in 2023, was short and productive. The car won the Rolex 24 at Daytona in its debut year, the third consecutive Daytona victory for Acura in endurance prototype competition. Over three seasons it accumulated eight wins total before today’s finale at Petit Le Mans.
Before the ARX-06, the ARX-05 DPi ran from 2018 through 2022 and built the foundation of what Acura became in prototype racing. That program generated 17 victories and 23 pole positions and swept all three IMSA championships in 2019, 2020, and 2022. The NSX GT3 program, which came alongside Meyer Shank Racing starting in 2017, added manufacturer, driver, and team titles in 2019 and then repeated the driver and team crowns in 2020. Stack all of it together and the decade produced 33 wins and 45 pole positions across GT and prototype classes.
Mike Shank, whose team ran both cars throughout the GTP era, framed today as a hard ending to something worth being proud of. “My life is different because of it, personally and professionally,” he said in a statement, “and I’m eternally grateful for all the folks at Acura and HRC. They put faith in us and we accomplished a lot together.” Shank’s team moves forward in IndyCar, a program that was already running alongside the IMSA effort.
HRC US president Kelvin Fu pointed to the hybrid powertrain development as a lasting asset. The ARX-06 competed in the GTP class, which mandates electrified drivetrains, and Fu noted that “the people, technology, and relationships developed will be an important part of our racing future.” What that future looks like concretely, Acura has not said. Honda’s EV pullback, which triggered the program’s pause, has not resolved into a clear timeline for what comes next in motorsport.
HRC is already thinking about the hardware from this era differently. The organization launched a formal program earlier this year to sell and support historic Acura and Honda race cars, beginning with championship-winning machinery from the ARX-01 and NSX GT3 generations. The ARX-06 is presumably still too fresh for that treatment, but the pipeline exists.
Acura was, somewhat improbably, the only US luxury brand to grow sales in the first quarter of 2026, up 5.2 percent to 32,352 units. The racing program did not hurt that. Whether it helped in any measurable way is harder to say, but a brand with 33 wins and 45 poles across a decade in one of North America’s premier road racing series does not exit quietly. It just exits.
Source: Acura. Images courtesy of Acura.
