IMSA: Transition time for Coyote Cars

If there has been one casualty to come from IMSA's switch from tubeframe Daytona Prototypes to its new carbon-fiber P2-based Daytona Prototype internationals, it's Coyote Cars.

The North Carolina-based DP constructor, winner of the last three WeatherTech SportsCar Championships in the Prototype class with Action Express Racing, isn't one of the four official 2017 P2 manufacturers, and as a result, its racecar production efforts have come to a halt.

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Although Dallara and Riley have survived the DP-to-DPi transition, Coyote president (and AXR team boss) Gary Nelson says starting a new season without the Coyote name on the grid to fight its rivals will feel strange.

"It's a bittersweet transition for us because we worked so many years and built a championship-winning Coyote program through the help of a lot of folks, but the bottom line is it was a steel tube frame racecar," Nelson told RACER. "The industry has now transitioned to carbon fiber tubs.

"And so when that became the obvious direction of road racing, we didn't even put in an application to be one of the constructors because the price of entry into the carbon tub racecar, it was too prohibitive for us for the small amount of volume we could make. On the steel tube chassis, I took all my years of NASCAR experience and it meshed right in. We were able to build the chassis, weld them, bend the tubing and build the whole car. Now it looks like those days are gone.

"We saved all of the DP blueprints, and all of the DP expertise is still in our house, in our building, but we are stepping aside and becoming one of the carbon tub customers on the race team side," Nelson said. Although he has an interest in building more racecars under the Coyote banner, joining the world of carbon fiber chassis construction, or doing smaller component manufacturing to support a larger chassis supplier is unlikely.

"We are more geared for production than we are custom work," Nelson continued. "We pride ourselves on our ability to make fixtures and jigs that last and provide us with the ability to produce the identical car part over and over again. So custom opportunities out there for small jobs, while they are something we certainly would look at, it is not really our plan to pursue that type of business."

One new area of manufacturing has opened up for Coyote – of the two-wheel variety. Its DPs might be mothballed, but there's a chance the Coyote brand will branch out into more motorcycle racing-based construction.

"We did a motorcycle project last year in the AMA flat track series," Nelson said. "We built four complete motorcycles to race in that series, and those folks are out competing with them now. That is a tube frame project that we took it on because it was multiple bikes and now we are still set up to continue that. We saw some pretty good results in our first year and we are hoping that 2017 brings even better results."