Acura today shared its first official pictures of the ARX-06, the car it will field in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship’s hybrid GTP category starting in 2023.
Based on a chassis designed by ORECA, the prototype racer aligns with LMDh regulations and will, therefore, also be eligible to race in the top class of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Although the car is still dressed in camouflage, Acura’s executive creative director, Dave Marek, did share some details about how the vehicle’s exterior was designed.
“The process we used in creating the exterior design for the Acura ARX-06 is exactly the same as how we create a new Acura passenger vehicle,” he said. “The same world-class stylists that lead Acura production car design created initial sketches, then pared those down to several potential designs.”
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From there, Marek said that the team created scale models of the cars in order to do aero and wind tunnel model testing. Acura’s designers then enlisted the help of Honda Performance Development to get their feedback on the car.
“The design continued to be refined throughout the testing and evaluation process until we came up with a final treatment that met our performance goals while maintaining all-important Acura styling cues,” said Marek. “It’s been an exciting process.”
The name of the car, meanwhile, is a callback to Acura’s previous racing experience, which stretches all the way back to 1991, just five years after the company was founded. The name ARX-06 stands for Acura Racing eXperimental, generation 6.
With plenty of more recent experience in IMSA’s DPi class, Acura will continue to partner with the teams that earned it Manufacturers, Drivers, and Teams championship titles in 2019 and 2020, Wayne Taylor Racing and Meyer Shank Racing, who will be fielding the ARX-06 in IMSA’s GTP class as of 2023.
