By the very nature of big-money professional racing competition, sports car manufacturers come and go with metronomic regularity. They race when it suits them, usually when new models come out, and often it does not when it comes to budgetary cycles. A three-year plan is stout, if you get five seasons you’re doing well, but one of the longest programs in recent history has been Lexus Racing’s thunderous 5-liter V8-powered RC F that’s been racing in the GTD classes of the IMSA WeatherTech Sport Car Championship for the thick end of a decade. And not many cars race for so long that they get given an affectionate nickname; in this case the team calls it the “War Pig.”
It’s funny hearing the story coming from Lexus Racing’s longtime boss Jeff Bal. As you’d expect from a grandly-titled Director of Motorsport, who popped up out of Toyota’s North American road car marketing machine, he’s a silver-haired chap who you’d more expect to find on a North Carolina golf course than perhaps in a grimy racing paddock. But he’s a racing fan, and it’s served him well, to the point he’s become an advocate in vouching for Vasser Sullivan Racing’s continued existence and enjoyed great success in spite of the venerability of this car.
“You need to understand the kind of the spirit that exists within our team,” says Bal when I ask about its surprising longevity. “We nicknamed the car the War Pig early on. It’s from the Black Sabbath song, War Pigs, that’s kind of our theme song. It just kind of sounds like a pig, I think. It snorts along, it’s got a big nose on it, and it gets down and dirty! You can’t stop it. You might slow us down, but you can’t stop us!
“Off the track, the amount of confidence and consideration we’ve received has been incredible. When we first got here in 2019, we had a lot of people asking, ‘Why is Lexus here? You have no business here.’ And they were probably right. But then we started to pick up a couple of wins – none of which were ours to win to start with. We got some luck, but it was also a lot of execution in the pits and on the stand that put us in position. And our drivers really muscled our way through and wheeled us to the win a few times.
“We’ve been slowed down, but we’ve always kept going. We love this car. It’s turned into an iconic-liveried car, with the black and bright yellow, and we’ve built a brand together. It seems like it’s gone by like that [he clicks his fingers]. Now it’s one last time for the War Pig.”
The Vasser element of the team is, of course, Jimmy Vasser – the 1996 IndyCar champion. He won that title for Chip Ganassi Racing in CART racing’s heydays, famously teaming with Alex Zanardi in those red Target-sponsored open-wheelers with yellow lightning bolts. Along with his business partner James ‘Sulli’ Sullivan, Vasser has steered the War Pig to major success, including the 2023 GTD Pro Drivers’ and Teams’ championships with the ace driving duo of Britain’s Ben Barnicoat and Jack Hawksworth.
“I always joke with Jeff Bal that his first day on the job for Lexus Motorsport was our first day in 2019 at Daytona – I don't know how we did it, but we came second,” says Vasser. “It was a big deluge of rain. One of our drivers just fully sent it for a couple of laps before the race went red, which turned out to be the end of it. Being along for the ride with Jeff, Lexus was in the process of building this sports car brand. They wanted to become a performance brand, and they have done that.
“It’s been really, really bitchin’ cool to see, to be along for the ride, to be on the race-team side and deliver some success. Obviously, we’re super-focused on making the team capable of winning races, then winning some races and ultimately winning the championship, which was the main goal. And Jeff has been a big driving force in keeping this team alive.”
One of its stalwart members is Bozi Tatarevic, mechanic and pit crew member – and the unofficial social media king of the crew! – who also gave us an insight into what makes this machine tick from the humans that prepare it.
“Personally, I’ve worked on this car since 2020, so it’s year six for me,” he says. “Greg Cates, our team manager, started working on this car with another team, and we have a handful of people who’ve been around for years. Most have been here for five-plus years. It speaks to the longevity of this team. Our environment is so good that people want to stick around.
“It’s kind of the nice thing, having the car for so long means we’re all very familiar with it, we have so much knowledge of the car, and when we show up at the track with Travis [Morgan] our crew chief, we can take it to pieces and build it back up in what feels like no time, because we’re so well drilled.”
And let’s also get a driver’s viewpoint: Former IndyCar pilot Hawksworth has been racing this car since 2017, when it was first run in IMSA competition by 3GT Racing. Incredibly, he’s in his 10th season driving the RC F, and it’s fair to say he knows it inside-out.
“My favorite thing about the RC F is that it's really, really well-balanced in high-speed corners,” he says. “The car creates a lot of downforce and has really good stability, so whenever we go to a track with really nice, high-speed, flowing corners, it grips the track really well and just gives you a lot of confidence. So, whenever we go to a high-speed track, it works really well.
“The weaknesses of the car, initially, was that it was quite fragile. It was difficult to make the brakes last for a full race, and we had gremlins that would usually appear six, seven or eight hours into the longer races. So, a two-hour sprint race was fine, and then the longer races became difficult. However, due to the work of Vasser Sullivan, TRD and the whole race team, we've managed to develop this car into something that can win the biggest endurance races in the world. We've managed to do that at Petit Le Mans, and the 12 Hours of Sebring, which are some of the toughest races you can win.”
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Lexus RC F is that its kept winning as the GTD category has evolved with the GT3 rules set, which has allowed purpose-built race cars from sports car giants Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, AMG-Mercedes and Aston Martin (to name but five). The RC F was once described to me as a ‘Frankenstein’ car, because it required its own homologation to fit the category.
“The RC F is a GT3, but it’s not a proper one,” admits Vasser. “It was originally conceived and built to race primarily in Japan, on very smooth tracks. It’s great racing, but not in the endurance capacity that’s really required here, at places like Sebring and Daytona. This is a rough, rough way to go.
“We’ve been able to adapt the way we race the car and the way we prepare it, while obviously staying within the homologation guidelines, you can’t change too much, but we know where the weak points are. But unfortunately, I think some of our competitors do too.”
I ask Jimmy for an example: “The nose on this car has over 1,500 pieces to put it together – screws and bolts and little widgets. A Ferrari or Porsche, for example, with a properly purpose-built GT3 car, can change a nose with two clips and, under yellow, you wouldn’t even go down a lap. We have to go back to the garage, and it’s an hour and a half. That’s just the way the nose was designed. It’s basically paper mâché and a bunch of little pieces.”
Hawksworth concurs, pointing out: “The competition has gotten tougher and tougher, but I think our trajectory has been that we've gotten better as a race team. What started off as a program where we didn't win a race in 2017, seven years later we won the championship and the Sebring 12-hour race. There was a learning curve, but we got there in the end.”
At Road Atlanta’s Petit Le Mans in October, he’ll pilot the RC F one last time. How does he feel about that? “Probably, yeah, a tear in the eye, but also some relief as well. It'll be a strange feeling. It's been a great car, we've had a lot of success with it, and it's been a massive part of Lexus' motorsport history. It's kind of like closing a chapter on what's been a really challenging but also super-successful period for the brand.
“What started off as very difficult at the beginning ended up being super successful, so whenever you have a story like that, I think it's pretty cool.”
