By alley - Oct 25, 2017, 2:17 PM ET

Performance Tech close to P2 purchase

IMSA PC champions Performance Tech Motorsports could have its deal to purchase a Dallara P217 chassis wrapped up by the end of the week.

The Florida-based WeatherTech SportsCar Championship outfit, which won seven of eight PC races this year on the way to sealing the title with Pato O'Ward, James French and Kyle Masson, will join the growing ranks in the Prototype category where privateer LMP2s and DPis are in store for an amazing 2018 season.

"The nice thing about Dallara, and I have a contract with them we're close to getting done, is they have a lot of experience with taking care of their customers," team owner Brent O'Neill told RACER. "I met with them, spent a few days with them, visited their facility in Indy, and they are building parts there, assembling cars there, and a lot is going on with Dallara to make me confident in where the relationship could go."

With the French ORECA and Ligier WEC LMP2 models already in the Prototype field, and

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, Performance Tech's Dallara would give IMSA at least one privateer chassis from each of the four approved ACO/FIA WEC P2 constructors.

According to O'Neill, the recent approval of various updates to three of the four models through the ACO/FIA "Joker" system helped point his team in the direction of the Italian Dallara brand.

"Once the 'Joker' updates were announced, we took some extra time to consider our options," he said. "The ORECA was going to be the benchmark of the [WEC P2] field, but Roger Penske's using ORECAs [in DPi] and even though they say they'll give us equal support, I wanted to look at my other options because [Penske] will always come first. We're a little team. And there was no Joker for the ORECA WEC car, so we looked at Ligier, and they wanted to make aero changes and to change their gearbox, and only got the aero stuff approved.

"And Multimatic has a lot of things they can change, and I have all the confidence they'll get there, but the one that stood out to me more than the rest was Dallara. The Dallara sucked at Le Mans in the low-drag kit, but we expect that to play out favorably for them with their Joker changes. Dallara has aero and suspension changes and as I saw it, the Joker played out for them the best."

The arrival of Performance Tech's WEC-spec Gibson V8 engine should be the last piece needed to complete the team's move from PC to Prototype.

"We're planning to get some test in by the end of November," O'Neill said. "It's about a four-week wait to get our Gibson, and in the meantime, there's a chassis and pretty much all of the car components coming together in Indy at Dallara to we can assemble everything and shake things down by Thanksgiving."

Final confirmation of Performance Tech's chassis vendor and its driver lineup could arrive within the next week.