Less than six months after its acquisition of the American Le Mans Series, NASCAR’s Grand-Am Road Racing has finalized the name and logo for the combined racing organizations, which will be known as United SportsCar Racing. The organization will use a logo that features a red helmet above an italicized sans-serif font that features the word United in black and SportsCar in red. The top of the helmet is composed of a curling line that represents three-quarters of an oval racetrack and the bottom is three-quarters of a square that represent an angulated street course. The name and logo will be unveiled today at 2:30pm ET at Sebring Int'l Raceway. N.Y.-based SME Branding spent four months working with Grand-Am and ALMS execs on the design, and the name, United SportsCar Racing, was selected from more than a thousand fan recommendations submitted through a “Name the Future” contest. Grand-Am President & CEO Ed Bennett said, “The core of the mark very descriptively says what the product is. We felt sportscar racing was very clear about what we are, and united, it means a few different things. In the early days, people will say we’re uniting two entities.” Bennett later said he hopes that "united" stands for the united manufacturers, drivers, team owners and sponsors who compose the series. As for the logo itself, Grand-Am Marketing Dir David Pettit said the series settled on a helmet because it felt it was “something that was ownable.” He added, “Surprisingly, a helmet hasn’t been used a lot.” ALMS President & CEO Scott Atherton: “Initially when people see this it will surprise them because it’s not like anything else they’ve seen in the (motorsports) industry. The icon logo we created is going to become something you see in the back window of high performance sports cars and people in the know will identify each other and say, ‘Hey, I know what that means.’ I’d like to see this logo in the back of every Porsche, Ferrari, Corvette and Viper I see.”
NEW SANCTIONING BODY: In addition to unveiling the new series name, Grand-Am and ALMS leaders plan to announce that the sanctioning body of the series will be the Int'l Motor Sports Association (IMSA), which sanctions ALMS. They will use a new logo for IMSA that features a straight red arrow framed by a black square that has a white s-shape in its center. IMSA was founded in '69 by the late Bill France Sr. The sanctioning body will oversee United SportsCar Racing and ancillary series such as the Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge, Ferrari Challenge, the IMSA GT3 Cup Challenge, the Cooper Tires Prototype Lites and the Porsche GT3 Cup Challenge Canada. The United SportsCar Racing series will feature five divisions: a prototype class that combines Grand-Am’s Daytona Prototypes with ALMS’ P2 and DeltaWing cars; a prototype challenge that retains ALMS’ current class structure; GT Le Mans (GTLM), which will be ALMS’ GT class; GT Daytona (GTD), a combination of Grand-Am’s GT class and ALMS’ GTC class; and GX, which comes from Grand-Am.
