LONG BEACH, Calif. — Ahead of Saturday’s Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach, Acura topped the close competition on display throughout a busy day of IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship action.
Nick Yelloly put Acura in the best possible position to earn the manufacturer’s first win in the flagship Grand Touring Prototype (GTP) class in its ‘home’ race.
Yelloly lapped the 1.968-mile Long Beach street course in 1 minute, 11.626 seconds (98.913 mph) in the No. 93 Acura Meyer Shank Racing w/Curb Agajanian Acura ARX-06 to claim the Motul Pole Award for Saturday’s 100-minute contest, the first sprint race of the 2026 WeatherTech Championship season.
An Acura ARX-06 set the GTP track record and started from pole position at Long Beach in 2023, the first year for the revived GTP class.
But Acura, which has U.S. headquarters in nearby Torrance, hasn’t claimed victory in the top sports car class of the popular Southern California festival that it has supported as title sponsor since 2019. Acura has won at Long Beach before, but it’s been since 2009 in the American Le Mans Series.
Yelloly was the first driver to break the 1:12 barrier in Friday’s 15-minute qualifying session, and he was consistently able to string together fast laps culminating in his pole-winning effort. But it was a close-run thing, because Marco Wittmann got within 0.030 seconds with his last lap of 1:11.656 (98.872 mph) in the No. 25 BMW M Team WRT BMW M Hybrid V8.
Louis Deletraz also improved on his final lap in the No. 40 Cadillac Wayne Taylor Racing Cadillac V-Series.R to 1:11.833 (98.628 mph) to move up to third as four manufacturers (Acura, BMW, Cadillac, and Porsche) were represented in the top five.
“We haven’t had the poles and the results that we needed so far this year, so to start on pole position here at our home Grand Prix is the most important thing and I’m just super proud,” said Yelloly, whose co-driver in the No. 93 Acura is Renger van der Zande. “We knew we had a good car in free practice, so I knew it was just a matter of executing the best I could. Had a couple good laps in the end, so that was nice.”
Acura has now claimed two Long Beach poles with the hybrid-powered ARX-06, two more with the previous generation ARX-05 that competed in the Daytona Prototype international (DPi) class, and one apiece for the earlier ARX-01a and ARX-01b. All were powered by engines designed and produced by Honda Racing Corporation USA, located in Santa Clarita, California.
This was Yelloly’s third pole in IMSA competition; he recorded his last at the 2025 WeatherTech Championship race at Road America and the other came on the Detroit street circuit.
The 35-year-old Englishman revealed he particularly enjoys driving on street courses, and van der Zande particularly talked Yelloly’s street course pace up in a pre-race media session.
“I’ve always been a fan of flirting with the walls and getting away with it, and today was great,” he said. “That’s been consistent in my career in everything I’ve done. I was able to push, and inch closer to the wall each lap. The Michelin tires held up well, especially for a softer compound, and I was just able to have fun.”
A spread of just 0.938 seconds covered the GTP field in qualifying, and it was even closer in practice, with a 0.645-second spread in the 60-minute morning session and 0.754 seconds during 90 minutes of afternoon running.
The joy for Acura and Meyer Shank was slightly tempered by Colin Braun’s Turn 8 incident in the afternoon session. The No. 60 Acura ARX-06 sustained enough damage in the left-front impact to require a chassis change and the entry will start from 11th place.
