On Sunday, Meyer Shank Racing will roll the No. 93 Acura ARX-06 off pit lane at Indianapolis Motor Speedway wearing a paint scheme built to say goodbye. Nobody told the championship standings the season’s actually over.
Acura and Honda Racing Corporation US confirmed this week that the No. 93 will carry a special “Thank You” livery for the final two rounds of the 2026 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship: this weekend’s TireRack.com Battle on the Bricks and the Petit Le Mans season finale at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta. The wrap is a retrospective, calling out the teams, drivers, tracks, and championships that carried Acura’s GTP program through a decade of competition. It’s also strapped to a car that’s currently mathematically alive in that same championship fight, with two races left to make up serious ground.
That tension — celebrating an ending while still racing for a result that hasn’t been decided — is the more interesting part of this story.
A Decade Condensed Into One Paint Scheme
Acura confirmed back in April that it’s pausing its GTP program at the end of 2026, closing out a decade of factory sports car racing that ran through three chassis: the NSX, the ARX-05, and the current ARX-06 hybrid prototype. The résumé attached to that run is substantial — 14 team, driver, and manufacturer championships, 33 victories, 43 pole positions, and top-class wins in each of IMSA’s four major North American sports car races, including three class wins at the Rolex 24 at Daytona. The livery itself is built like a highlight reel wrapped around a chassis, giving credit to the specific teams, drivers, and tracks that made that decade possible.
The Championship Math Doesn’t Care About Nostalgia
We put together a breakdown of the title picture at Indianapolis earlier this week, and the short version is this: Nick Yelloly and Renger van der Zande’s No. 93 trails Jack Aitken and Earl Bamber’s championship-leading Cadillac by 185 points, with Porsche Penske’s factory 963 and JDC-Miller Motorsports’ customer entry also standing between the Acura and the top of the table. Two races isn’t much room to close a gap that size, especially with Sunday’s race reverting to a two-hour, forty-minute sprint format after running as a six-hour enduro the past two years — a change that hands Meyer Shank Racing less strategic cushion to recover from a rough qualifying session, not more.
That’s an awkward setup for a paint scheme designed to look backward. A team chasing a long-shot title needs a clean qualifying lap and a disciplined pit strategy. A team running a farewell tour wants cameras on the car regardless of where it finishes. Meyer Shank Racing doesn’t get the luxury of picking just one this weekend.
What “Pausing” Actually Leaves Unanswered
Acura’s choice of words matters here: this is a pause, not a shutdown, and the company has stopped short of saying anything about a return. That restraint is worth watching against Honda’s recent history of buying back its own historic race cars rather than letting them disappear into private collections, a pattern that suggests the parent company treats its motorsport hardware as an asset rather than a sunk cost. What’s genuinely unclear is what a pause means for Meyer Shank Racing itself, the team that has fielded every Acura GTP entry across this run, and for a GTP class that’s about to lose one of the manufacturer names that has defined it since 2023 — right as Porsche’s Balance of Performance dispute with its own customer team has been the loudest storyline of the season. Fewer factory names on the grid tends to mean more scrutiny on whoever’s left standing.
What to Watch This Weekend
Green flag for the Battle on the Bricks is 3 p.m. ET Sunday. The No. 93 needs a genuinely strong qualifying result to make any real dent in that points gap before the series packs up for Road Atlanta in October. Whatever happens on track, that livery will still say thank you afterward — win, lose, or wherever it lands in the standings. Acura just picked an unusually complicated weekend to start looking backward.
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