IMSA: 'A letter to our fans'

To our fans,

As we prepare to celebrate the inaugural season of the TUDOR United Sports Championship tonight in New York City, we wanted to say thank you, on behalf of the entire IMSA team.

We learned a number of valuable lessons throughout our inaugural season, and did our best to work swiftly to address challenges as they arose. As we pay tribute to the accomplishments of 2014, rest assured that work already has begun in our Daytona Beach headquarters to make the 2015 TUDOR Championship and subsequent seasons even better.

We appreciate all of the feedback we've received throughout the season and hope you would agree that we have been listening and made changes to improve your experience and the quality of this sport that we all love.

In case you missed the recent announcement, beginning in 2015, popular sports car announcers Greg Creamer, John Hindhaugh and Jeremy Shaw will team up as voices of IMSA Radio, which will provide live audio coverage of all domestic IMSA series, including the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship and Continental Tire SportsCar Challenge.

Our back-to-back FOX network telecasts of the Lone Star Le Mans at Circuit of The Americas and Petit Le Mans powered by Mazda from Road Atlanta each drew an average of more than one million viewers throughout the two-hour broadcast. Both also had peak audiences of greater than two million viewers. These are some of the most impressive television numbers generated for sports car programming in a long time, and gives all of us involved in IMSA positive momentum as we look toward 2015.

In addition to the FOX broadcasts we were able to provide live streaming of the entire Petit Le Mans powered by Mazda and will continue to look into ways to provide live video content to our passionate fans while also actively reaching out to new fans.

Thanks to you, we also saw record at-track attendance throughout the season.

On the digital front, IMSA.com had more than 21 million page views, and 38 percent of site visitors were new. On YouTube, full-race replays were available and fans viewed over 200,000 hours of video. The TUDOR Championship Facebook page has recorded more than 38 million impressions and race weekend Twitter mentions increased by 225 percent over last year's performance by the GRAND-AM Rolex Sports Car Series and the American Le Mans Series presented by Tequila Patrón.

Please know that everyone at IMSA appreciates your passion and loyalty to sports car racing. Because of you, we have much to be proud of and celebrate. We will not rest on our laurels and always will strive to deliver an even better experience for sports car racing fans.

Thank you again for a great 2014. We can't wait to launch the 2015 season in less than 90 days at Daytona International Speedway for the Roar Before the Rolex 24!

Respectfully, 

Ed Bennett
Chief Executive Officer

Scott Atherton
President and COO