A Beginner’s Guide To The Petit Le Mans

This weekend, the IMSA SportsCar Championship – North America’s biggest sports car racing series, and second globally only to the World Endurance Championship – is concluding its 2025 season with its annual visit to the state of Georgia for the Petit Le Mans.

Wait, the what now? For the uninitiated, this might just sound like a shameless cash-in on the one endurance race that everyone knows the name of, but in the world of motorsport, this day-to-night endurance race is quite a big deal in its own right. Here’s everything you need to know.

Where does the Petit Le Mans take place?

Not at Le Mans, or anywhere near it. Rather, it’s run at Road Atlanta, a pretty spectacular 2.5-mile natural terrain road course located just outside the town of Braselton, Georgia, about 40 miles northeast of the city it’s named after.

So why’s it called that?

Fair question. The race’s origins lie with the late Don Panoz, an American businessman and car enthusiast whose name you might recognise from his eponymous sports car brand, responsible for wacky-looking stuff like the Esperante and Abruzzi. He also invented the nicotine patch. That last bit’s not really relevant, but it is vaguely interesting.

Anyway, Panoz was a big player in American sports car racing in the ’90s, and wanted an into-the-night race that encapsulated the spirit of the most famous endurance race of all, the 24 Hours of Le Mans. He arranged with IMSA, the North American sports car racing sanctioning body, to hold an inaugural event at Road Atlanta in 1998, and worked with the ACO – the governing body of Le Mans itself – to adopt the race’s ruleset and its name. The winning squad would even receive an automatic entry to compete in the following year’s Le Mans.

All this was with a view to creating a global Le Mans endurance series, and while this never quite panned out, it did spawn a couple of regional series. They included the successful American Le Mans Series, of which the Petit Le Mans served as one of the flagship events from its first season in 1999 to its last in 2013. After that, the ALMS merged with the competing Rolex Sports Car Series to form the IMSA SportsCar Championship, and the Petit Le Mans has been the season closer since then.

It’s a 24-hour race, then?

No, actually. If you’re up to speed on your primary school-level French, you’ll know its name literally translates to ‘Little Le Mans’, so it doesn’t run entirely around the clock. Instead, it kicks off just after midday local time and runs for 10 hours, finishing up just after 10pm, ensuring a distilled version of the day-night cycle that makes full 24-hour races so unique.

What cars are racing there?

There are three classes of cars that run in IMSA, and while not every class does every event, all three contend in the Petit Le Mans. Going for overall honours is the GTP category, IMSA’s name for the Hypercar class that’s attracted so many factory entries over the last few years. 

In IMSA, it’s entered by Porsche, Cadillac, BMW, Aston Martin, Acura (read: posh Honda) and Lamborghini (although this year’s Petit Le Mans will be the last race for Lambo’s short-lived programme).

Then there’s LMP2, a second-tier prototype category. In theory, there are several cars that are allowed to enter this class, but so dominant has the Nissan V8-powered Oreca 07 proven that every LMP2 team uses it, effectively turning it into a one-make category.

Then, there’s GTD. This is IMSA’s branding for the globally popular GT3 category, featuring racing versions of production sports and supercars. This is further split into two classes, based on driver categorisation. The top GTD Pro category has no restrictions and tends to be entered by hotshot career drivers who’ve been doing nothing but racing their entire lives, while GTD mandates that at least one of a car’s three drivers must be from the FIA’s Bronze or Silver categorisation, a ranking that’s determined by their age and prior racing career.

Is there anyone racing I’ve heard of?

Depends on how clued up you are on endurance racing already. The GTP class is populated by plenty of drivers with stellar records in the discipline, like Neel Jani, Kévin Estre, Laurens Vanthoor and Earl Bamber.

There are also various names you’ll recognise if you follow Formula 1. Among recent graduates are Kevin Magnussen, racing for BMW, and Daniil Kvyat and Romain Grosjean, both driving for Lamborghini. Paul di Resta, also a past F1 driver, is racing in LMP2. From the world of IndyCar, meanwhile, six-time series champion Scott Dixon is hopping into the #60 Acura in GTP.

Among the lower classes, you’ll need to be a very hardcore motorsport person to be overtly familiar with many of the drivers.

Sounds fun, how can I watch it?

Firstly, be aware that the Petit Le Mans takes place on a Saturday rather than a Sunday. That’s this coming Saturday, 11 October. If you’re in the US and you want to watch the entire race live, you’ll need to be on NBC’s Peacock streaming service. In much of the rest of the world, including the UK, IMSA streams live for free both on its YouTube channel and on its own website. Maybe get some energy drinks if you want to watch the whole thing in Europe, though: the time zone difference means it kicks off at 5pm and doesn’t end until 3am.