Examine the heritage of road racing in the United States and you will find, well, that there really isn’t one that amounts to much. In this country, racing with right- and left-hand turns has teetered for sixty years on the brink of extinction—ever since the hallowed race through the streets of Watkins Glen, New York, in 1948.

The Glen race constituted the birth of modern sports car racing in the U.S. It featured mostly strange cars from overseas, driven or owned by well-to-do men whose talent ranged from world-class to “Jesus, look out, here he comes again!” It was a cry for help—as in, please, help us make road racing the sport here that it is in Europe.

And that was about it for the early decades. Sports car racing and road racing—which are used interchangeably here—remained the province of well-meaning amateurs and wealthy sportsmen, an archaic term that described people who didn’t have to work for a living but were attracted to expensive and dangerous pursuits such as auto racing, polo, offshore power boating, and marrying trophy wives.

Road racing was a natural for sportsmen. Sadly, sportsmen historically have had problems making things commercially viable. Look what they’ve done for polo and offshore power boating, where they seem to subscribe to the elitist dictum of “the right crowd and no crowding.”

To be fair, road racing was hardly a no-brainer on the business front. A spectator death at Watkins Glen revealed that hay bales were of no more use than hope as spectator protection, whereupon road racing then moved to purpose-built tracks. It has since, on occasion, moved back to temporary street courses, all of which have failed at their primary goal of “looking just like Monaco” and most of which have failed at their secondary goal of attracting large crowds of paying customers.

There has been an occasional bright spot through these six decades. The Can-Am series can still send its aging fans into frothing raptures, never mind that it rarely offered close racing. The Trans-Am series was far better and was the Sports Car Club of America’s high-water mark in professional racing. Trans-Am had star drivers, factory-backed teams of pony cars, and competition intense enough to make hockey players drool.

Now comes a sanctioning body called the Grand American Road Racing Association, or just Grand-Am, mother ship of the Rolex Series. Formally, it is the Rolex Sports Car Series presented by Crown Royal Special Reserve, Happy, Dopey, Sleepy, and Doc.

Okay, just kidding about the dwarfs. But depending on whom you lend your ears to, the Rolex Series, as we insiders call it, is either the savior of American road racing or is an abomination concocted by infidels who are the traditional road racing fan’s worst bête noire—which is to say, NASCAR.

Traditionalists do not want to hear that NASCAR’s two Nextel Cup road races at Watkins Glen and Sonoma probably attract more fans than any season of any road racing series in U.S. history. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, aren’t we?

There is indeed a NASCAR connection to Grand-Am. Jim France, youngest son of the legendary William H.G. France, who founded NASCAR, is the series’ overlord. He does not sit on the board, nor does he hold other office within Grand-Am, but he is a France, an investor in Grand-Am, and he has long believed that road racing can, like Pinocchio, grow up to be a real boy.

One entrant who is a devout believer in Grand-Am is Bob Snodgrass, leader of Brumos Motor Cars’ two-car Porsche- powered Daytona Prototype (DP) team. Brumos has a history of excellence on and off the track, and the straight-talking Snodgrass is not a man to waste money. Spend, yes. Waste, no. Shelter from the NASCAR umbrella appeals to Snodgrass, as does the support and involvement of Jim France.

“If Grand-Am is the NASCAR-ization of road racing, we’re proud of that,” Snodgrass says. “We’re closing the gap between the beginning of a series and the point where it begins to attract major sponsorship money.”

Snodgrass, who was a driving force behind the formation of Grand-Am and the DP cars, is quick to acknowledge the France influence. “Jim France has never given me guidance that wasn’t correct,” he says.

Grand-Am, now in its seventh season, operates from the NASCAR campus at 1801 West International Speedway Boulevard in Daytona Beach, though it functions independently of the stock car organization. Grand-Am president Roger Edmondson admits that this relationship with the big dogs ensures the series gets its phone calls answered, an advantage not enjoyed by everyone in the money-seeking business, meaning most people involved in auto racing.

The commissioner of Grand-Am, John Bishop, came as close to writing a road racing success story as anyone ever did. Bishop founded the International Motor Sports

Association in 1969 and held its first full season in 1971. Though IMSA hardly became a household acronym, it lasted twenty years under Bishop and brought more stability to road racing than the SCCA ever did. NASCAR founder Bill France, Sr., put up most of the money to launch IMSA.

IMSA survives today, under different ownership, as the sanctioning body for the American Le Mans Series, the other organization that hopes to make road racing a part of the American entertainment world. The ALMS is owned by Dr. Donald Panoz, father of the nicotine patch and one of the few drug-connected road racing figures whose life has been one hundred percent legal and legitimate.

The ALMS is tied to France—the country, not the family—through the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, and it adheres to rules set by the ACO for participation in the world’s oldest and best known endurance race, les Vingt-Quatre Heures du Mans, which we provincials call the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

The ALMS, whose marquee cars are called Le Mans Prototypes (LMP1 and LMP2), mounted ten races in 2006 and will run twelve this year. LMP cars are descended from the international Group C cars, which became World Sports Cars in the 1990s. With the exception of Formula 1 cars, LMP1 cars are the most expensive racing systems on earth.

Minimum weight and maximum engine displacement regulations separate LMP1 from LMP2 cars. The cars must also be open and have two seats, but that’s about it. There exists a wide range of equipment options. In an effort to ensure LMP1 cars prevail, the ACO has mandated a 1.5 percent performance advantage for them over the lighter and less powerful LMP2 cars. Now there’s a rule for the ages.

The relatively unfettered development in the LMP classes is best exemplified with the appearance of winning diesel-powered cars—Audi’s R10, designed and built in Germany at costs not seen since the Marshall Plan. And Acura, drawing on the formidable Honda racing organization, got off to an impressive debut at Sebring this year, entering two cars in LMP2 and winning the class.

An Audi R8 or R10 won every race last year in the LMP1 class, though Penske Racing’s LMP2 Porsche RS Spyders finished one-two overall at Mid-Ohio. The Audis had the 2006 championship iced by the end of the sixth race, and they opened 2007 by adding to their win streak.

Grand-Am’s Rolex Series, in an obvious nod to NASCAR’s experience-based formula, does not encourage direct factory participation. Rather, it has signed off on a set of rules that establish certain dimensional hard points for its DP cars, within which an entrant may install an approved chassis, transaxle, and engine. And, like the Nextel Cup Series, incentives to encourage regular attendance are in place.

At present, BMW, Ford, Infiniti, Lexus, Pontiac, and Porsche are approved DP engines (the Pontiac can also be branded as a Cadillac or a Chevrolet). Three firms supply approved transaxles: EMCO, Hewland, and Xtrac. Finally, competitors may choose from among seven constructors: Chase, Crawford, Doran, Fabcar, Multimatic, Picchio, and Riley.

At the conclusion of this year’s Daytona 24 Hour, Rileys—powered by three different engines—filled eight of the top ten slots including the winner, a Lexus-powered car driven by Juan Pablo Montoya, Scott Pruett, and Salvador Durán.

The DP cars are enclosed, mid-engined, have approximately 500 horsepower, and can attain speeds in the 185-mile-perhour area. The ALMS cites up to 700 horsepower, and 200 to 210 mph for its LMP1 cars.

In their respective races at Laguna Seca in 2006, fourteen DP cars finished on the lead lap, whereas only four LMP1 cars did. That gives the DP cars a big edge in closeness of competition, but there was a significant difference in speed. One of the Penske Porsche RS Spyders recorded a lap time of 1:14.157, while the fastest lap turned by a DP car was 1:25.205. That’s 108.65 mph for the LMP car and 94.56 mph for the DP racer. As the man said, speed costs money; how fast do you want to go?

There is merit in examining further the closeness of competition. At this year’s Daytona 24 Hour, for example, a tick over one second separated the fastest qualifier from the fifteenth-fastest. For the fifteen-race Rolex Series season last year, an average of 9.6 DP cars finished on the lead lap, including six-, nine-, and twenty-four-hour races. The average for LMP racers on the lead lap was 2.7 cars.

Cost, according to Rolex Series competitors, is far lower in their league than in the ALMS. A DP chassis costs about $500,000 but can be used for several seasons. In a series that encourages direct factory mega-dollar expenditures, a multimillion-dollar car can be competitive one week and a sputtering also-ran the next.

The negative effect of cost on participation is illustrated by the number of top-class cars in each series. An average of twentyfive DP cars appeared at each Rolex Series event last year, while the average number of LMP entries in ALMS races was just more than ten. The average field for ALMS races, including all four of its classes, was about twenty-five cars.

Like Formula 1 fans, supporters of the ALMS are quick to drive their claim stakes into the leading- edge-of-technology turf. And they are correct to do so. Even though the Audi diesels must run on some mysterious witch’s brew and not the fuel you use in your Ford F-350 Power Stroke, few of us would have predicted a diesel win at Le Mans.

Appearance is another advantage ALMS proponents are fond of pointing out. Their cars are low and swoopy, and the DP cars are just a tad dippy-looking, largely because of their high rooflines. “They’re not ugly, they’re safe,” Bob Snodgrass says tartly.

The ALMS has four classes: the two Prototypes, and two Grand Touring classes. Rolex has two classes: Daytona Prototype and Grand Touring. The GT classes in both series are for production-based cars that at least look like close relatives of the Corvettes, Aston Martins, Ferraris, Mustangs, and other cars you see on the street. There are some single-class events (DP or GT) in the Rolex Series, but in both series the classes normally run together. Rolex has an entirely separate two-class series called the Koni Challenge, which features sports cars and coupes that are much closer to showroom-stock cars.

The Rolex Series’ annual kickoff is the Daytona 24 all-day race-fest, and the ALMS opens with another familiar endurance racing name, the 12 Hours of Sebring. Last year, sixty-six cars started at Daytona, and this year saw seventy. At the 2006 Sebring event, the ALMS mustered thirty-five entries, and this year thirty-four cars ran in the race.

Both the Rolex Series and the ALMS have more television coverage than the sports car racing fan of yore would have dared dream of. All twenty-five events in the two series have some form of exposure to the nation’s couch potatoes.

So, which series is the future of American road racing?

If you want a connection to European road racing and Le Mans, and if you believe speed and barely restricted development attract more fans than close competition, you’d have to vote for the ALMS and hope it generates larger fields than it did in its first eight seasons.

If you believe NASCAR seriously wants to take a deeper and more committed position in road racing than it did with IMSA in the 1970s and ’80s—and that large fields and closer competition are the key to road racing success—it would be difficult to bet against Grand-Am and the Rolex Series.

“Remember,” said Bob Snodgrass, “you won’t find a product coming out of Daytona that’s not successful.”