DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Longtime sports car aficionados may note the name “van der Steur Racing” as a deep cut from a prior era.
The Maryland-based team has its roots in the American Le Mans Series, running first a Lola B2K/40 and then Radical SR9 prototype chassis in the mid-2000s, with Dutch-born, South African-raised Gunnar van der Steur at the wheel.
Flash forward nearly two decades and the team is back again and will soon ascend to the top-level IMSA-sanctioned championship of this era, the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
Van der Steur Racing was confirmed in mid-September to run an IMSA Michelin Endurance Cup effort in the Grand Touring Daytona (GTD) class in 2025, and the team may add select sprint races. It also will continue its full-time presence in the Michelin Pilot Challenge Grand Sport (GS) class.
Rory van der Steur, Gunnar’s son, has become part of the fabric in the Michelin Pilot Challenge over the last five years. Together with a consortium of co-drivers, most notably friend and Aston Martin ace Valentin Hasse-Clot, he enjoyed his best season in 2024, finishing fourth in GS driver points while the team finished third in the standings.
“My dad did those one-off races in LMP2 in the early 2000s, or LM675 with the Lola B2K/40. Then in 2005 we purchased one of six Radical SR9s,” the younger van der Steur said. “We have one of the only SR9s left in the world with everything original and the spares.
“After we rejoined IMSA after all my karting years, we always had an eye on (competing in the WeatherTech Championship) and said we’d be there one day. But we needed to build our resume up.”
The team has acquired two ex-Flying Lizard Motorsports Aston Martin Vantage GT3 Evo chassis. Van der Steur said the team’s current GS crew, led by team manager Christopher Deely, will continue to oversee the GS program and “shadow” the Prodrive and Aston Martin crew supporting and running the GTD car. The team unveiled its new GTD cars at the IMSA-sanctioned test held at Daytona International Speedway in November.
The relationship with Aston Martin has grown over a two-year run in GS, with the idea of advancing into the WeatherTech Championship formulated in January.
“It’s a big project we’ve been working on for a while,” van der Steur said. “We had the idea at Daytona and then thought, ‘Can we do this?’ We saw it was possible, and our cars are back at the shop already.”
The steps in Michelin Pilot Challenge have been character-building. Two years in the Touring Car (TCR) class with Hyundai’s Veloster N TCR featured flashes of potential but were punctuated by a malady of mechanical mishaps.
After debuting at the 2020 Sebring finale, van der Steur and Denis Dupont had their first podium visit with second place at Road America in 2021 and finished 13th in the points. Van der Steur and co-driver Tyler Gonzalez added a third place at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca in 2022, improving to ninth in points.
However, it was a race van der Steur failed to finish that inarguably provided the most visible and pivotal moment in the team’s return to IMSA.
Just four races into its step up to GS, van der Steur’s car was inadvertently used as a launching pad when Robert Megennis overshot his braking point and catapulted his No. 95 Turner Motorsport BMW M4 GT4 on top of van der Steur’s Aston Martin at the Turn 3 hairpin on the new Detroit downtown street course.
With just three weeks to rebuild until the next race at Watkins Glen, the small team performed a herculean effort to get the car ready. The Frankenstein-looking car finished fifth.
“It was crazy. I have flashbacks, but now I laugh on it because it went viral,” van der Steur said of the Detroit mishap.
“I don’t know how we made Watkins Glen. We didn’t have time to wrap it! We finished fifth that race and third the next one (with Austin McCusker at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park). The momentum grew. It pushed everyone for this year.”
This is the second significant step in the team’s program, but a much bigger one than moving from TCR to GS. Yet the confidence forged from that incident in Detroit has pushed the team higher, one where its 2024 season featured three podiums.
“We had always a fast car in TCR, but we battled adversity when it came to reliability,” van der Steur said. “In GS, we wanted to learn a rear-wheel drive platform before stepping up to GT3.
“We continued to grow. This year we grew exponentially with the help of Aston Martin. Having (co-drivers) Valentin, Scott (Andrews), Alex (Premat), Danny (Formal), they all have their own ways of driving so I try to put that into one.
“It’s a big step. It’s not like going from TCR to GS. It’s way more intense. I’m very excited, as is the crew. I think it all stems from results. Once you have results, the crew wants to do better and go to the next level.”