While uncertainty looms for some IMSA GTD Pro teams, RLL's in for the long haul

While prominent GTD Pro squads like Pfaff Motorsports and Paul Miller Racing have either announced plans to leave IMSA or are facing an uncertain future, RLL Team McLaren’s vice president of IMSA operations Ricardo Nault confirmed to RACER that the team will continue in IMSA for the upcoming season and beyond.

RLL (Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing) will continue to race the current 720S GT3 Evo in the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship while also embarking on a testing program for McLaren’s next-generation GT3 car that is expected to launch in 2028.

“Overall, I think [this year has gone] not as well as I would like,” Nault admitted. “We were hoping to sit on a few podiums along the way, and we had the chance to do so. A few missteps now and then, and a few mechanicals that were obviously unfortunate.

“Working with McLaren’s been really quite nice: They’re very open to input, and we communicate well with some of the other teams that run the cars in other series, but there’s still some challenges to it. I’m looking forward to the new GT3 car; we have one more year with this one, and we’ll start testing with the new car as well in preparation for 2028.”

The team has serious ambitions about expanding to a two-car program, but Nault told RACER that as the current 720S GT3 Evo is phased out, RLL will stick to one car in 2027. “We’re looking to do a one-car program and do the testing on the 2028 car, and use the testing time to build the personnel to campaign two cars in 2028 with McLaren,” he stated.

“And that can always change; we’re in discussions with people about running a second car, but with one last year left in this chassis, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense financially to campaign a second one [in 2027].”

RLL still harbors ambitions of returning to race in IMSA’s GTP class after its separation from BMW. And with the MCL-HY nearing its 2027 FIA World Endurance Championship debut, Nault is still hopeful that RLL could one day race the new McLaren prototype in GTP.

“We’d like to go back to running the hypercars and would love to do it with McLaren. But we’ve got to continue to build up this program and make this strong enough to be able to campaign a GTP car properly,” Nault said. “When we lost the BMW program, a lot of good people went away, some with it, and some onto other endeavors. We’re rebuilding the whole staff to some degree to make sure we can campaign a car at the highest level.”

It’s been a tough 2026 season for the No. 59 RLL Team McLaren 720S GT3 Evo, with a best finish of only a sixth place at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park. But despite the team’s struggles for results, Nault has been satisfied with the progress of his team’s rookie drivers, Max Esterson and newly-crowned Indy NXT Champion Nikita Johnson.

“Both guys are doing really well,” Nault said of his team’s two young drivers. “They just keep on learning, keep on getting better with the car. They’re getting faster and faster, which is a positive for us.

“And the engineers are learning the car as well; we’ve got quite a different setup now than we did at Daytona, and it just keeps on progressing. We qualify pretty well, but we just haven’t been able to put it together during the race and get the results we want. But I think the whole team are all doing a good job learning the car and getting better.”

This weekend RLL Team McLaren returns to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course, where the IMSA team finished 1-2 during the six-hour Battle on the Bricks in 2024, and where the RLL Team McLaren will get a boost for the season-ending Motul Petit Le Mans: McLaren factory GT driver Benjamin Goethe, one of the Pro drivers for WEC LMGT3 team Garage 59, is set to join Esterson and Johnson at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta two weeks from now.