At Le Mans, Garage 56 Shows the World What NASCAR Does Best

A NASCAR stock car is a spectacle of its own. Anyone who has attended a Cup Series race on a road course knows that a massive car with a loud V-8 and big, blocky fenders hustling through a technical track is a sight to behold, one unlike anything seen anywhere else in the world. A growth-oriented NASCAR regime recognizes this, but racing fans outside of the U.S. who may have otherwise ignored NASCAR have no way of experiencing it without seeing a race in person. How do you bring the series to the attention of those fans? By bringing the cars to them, of course.

This is the sentiment that led to the creation of the Garage 56 Camaro, a celebration of the 75th anniversary of NASCAR at the centenary 24 Hours of Le Mans. NASCAR itself has partnered with Chevrolet and Hendrick Motorsports to develop a higher-performance, one-off variant of its new-for-2022 Next Gen stock car platform to race under Garage 56 rules as an unclassified car at the hundredth anniversary 24 Hours of Le Mans.

It's the same concept that brought NASCAR onto the field at the Los Angeles Coliseum and, next month, will bring the series onto the streets of Chicago. In both instances, NASCAR has compromised its typical expectations for a racing track to get their cars into the heart of a major city that had previously been asked to travel to intermediate ovals on the outskirts of the metro area. This is the same sentiment flipped, with the series willing to compromise the ideas of both what a NASCAR stock car actually is and what it does to get the car on a stage completely unique from its usual races.

The result is a revival of an old and very strange idea. Just as Bill France Jr. did back in 1976, NASCAR executive Jim France found a way to get a stock car into the world's greatest endurance race. France tapped John Doonan, who works alongside France as the president of IMSA in his day job, to run the program alongside Hendrick and Chevrolet.

Doonan says the series "wanted as much NASCAR DNA in the project as possible." That means a car that looks and sounds like it does on any given race weekend, of course, but it also means live pit stops with a manual jack and trained athletes who specialize in the practice. That, he notes, was a specific ask from Le Mans organizers; apparently, when the ACO saw the car initially presented with air jacks, they asked directly to "see proper NASCAR pit stops" instead.

After a week of testing, practicing, and winning pit stop competitions, the car is a quick fan favorite. Fly-by videos and still photos of the car next to its prototype competition have been viral hits across the web. Like the Deltawing before it, the car is the right kind of out of place, an absolute delight to see fly down the track at speed. Unlike the Deltawing, it has so far also proven to be fast and reliable; the car has yet to suffer a major problem in any practice session and was able to outrun every single GTE-Am car in testing and practice-qualifying.