Acura and Meyer Shank Racing had already won their fair share of championships and major endurance races in IMSA, whether separately or in unison. But for so many years, Long Beach was the one that Acura wanted to win, and not solely because Honda’s luxury division has been the title sponsor of the race since 2019…although, if you ask Renger van der Zande, it certainly was a big motivator. “It’s the event of the year for Acura,” van der Zande said going into the week. “And we’re trying to make it happen.”

And in 2026, they achieved their goal, with a quick car, two quick drivers, and a little bit of good fortune in the race. Van der Zande and Nick Yelloly won from pole in their blue and orange #93 Acura ARX-06 to snap a painful winless drought at Long Beach for the Honda Motor Company.

“Winning the Acura Grand Prix, for Acura, as an Acura driver…I think that’s what makes it very, very special,” said the Dutchman, whose third Long Beach IMSA win feels like the sweetest of the trio.

Before Saturday’s win for van der Zande and Yelloly, Honda’s last IMSA win at Long Beach came back in 2013, predating the merger of the American Le Mans Series and Grand-Am into today’s IMSA. The 2013 ALMS Long Beach race was the scene of Pickett Racing’s HPD-badged ARX-03 going back-to-back at Long Beach.

And Acura, the luxury brand launched 40 years ago in the nearby city of Torrance, California (site of Honda’s US headquarters), hadn’t won since 2009 when Simon Pagenaud and the late Gil de Ferran won together in their ARX-02.

“We got brought to this programme almost to win this one, I would say,” van der Zande said of himself and Yelloly. In that case, they did very, very well.

The win got the #93 Acura’s season back on track after two disappointing results to start the 2026 WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season: Fifth at Daytona, sixth at Sebring, two races filled with regrettable misfortunes, and with frustration over Porsche Penske Motorsport’s dominance becoming hard to constrain. But in just 100 minutes, van der Zande and Yelloly got back to their winning ways in IMSA GTP.

Together, they led 53 out of the race’s 70 laps – but it wasn’t all as straightforward as it could have appeared at a glance.

“It was all relatively smooth sailing until it wasn’t,” joked Yelloly, a first-time winner at Long Beach. He coughed up the lead early on in the race when negotiating slower GTD traffic. As Orey Fidani and his 13 Autosport Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R pulled to the left, Yelloly got stuck behind the Corvette, which allowed Jack Aitken in the #31 Cadillac Whelen V-Series.R to pass him on the right.

“I went one way, thinking the guy had seen me, and he clearly hadn’t. I think he panicked when he’d seen Jack go to the left a little bit and slammed the brakes. So I gave him a little nudge, and unfortunately, that wasn’t what we’d planned on doing,” admitted the Englishman.

“I just tried to then stay as close as I could with quite a big fuel target, and see how it played out in the pit stops.”

When Cadillac seemed to have the upper hand, a bizarre sequence played out to Acura’s benefit. Philipp Eng of BMW M Team WRT and Laurin Heinrich of JDC-Miller MotorSports had been battling hard for position. Eng’s defence bled over the edge of fairness, and just after Yelloly dove to pit lane for the #93 Acura’s routine pit stop, Eng ended up in the tyre barrier at turn eight and brought out a full course yellow just when Acura needed it.

“Obviously, we fell on the right side of that yellow, which was great for us. And then, yeah, it was a nail-biting finish, but I knew the man behind the wheel could do the job,” he added, gesturing towards his co-driver.

But even after Van der Zande cycled to the front of the GTP field, the job was far from done. Aitken’s co-driver, Frederik Vesti, kept him honest towards the end. Four times, van der Zande needed a good restart to keep Vesti and his red Cadillac in the rear view.

“I think it was a great battle, but for sure, they had a bit of an upper hand on the pace,” van der Zande remarked.

“I had to keep the rears (tyres) alive a little bit. Our car generally has a bit of oversteer and more tyre degradation on the rear than the other brands have. So I think we seem to be very, very fast in qualifying and then lack a bit of racing pace.”

Van der Zande has never been afraid to take a calculated risk for a win, but he needed to do that many times to stay ahead in the race. “I think the car came alive a little bit just before the traffic, I kind of was managing the pace, just feeling where the grip was and all that. I knew my time in traffic where I could make a gap – and it happened like that,” he recalled.

“You have to be lucky in a way, for sure. But I think the risks I took in traffic was high to get a gap. When I was through traffic, the yellow came, so it was not very good. And then yellow, after yellow, after yellow!

“I think the restarts were quite easy, I would say, to maintain the front. But then when the #31 got the tyre temperatures in the car, that’s when I needed to worry a little. I was managing it, but on a street track, it’s so hard to overtake,” he added.

This was a great win for Acura Meyer Shank Racing, but of course, factoring in the bigger picture going into this year’s Grand Prix of Long Beach certainly made it a more poignant moment in the IMSA season.

Friday saw the revelation spread that Acura and Honda’s future in IMSA may be in doubt due to factors beyond the control of the hard-working mechanics, engineers, drivers, and staff behind the programme. But neither winning driver cared to get wrapped up in the speculation – instead, making the correct choice to just enjoy the moment, and use it as fuel for the rest of the season, whether this is or isn’t the ‘last dance’ for the Acura GTP programme.

“Winning races is the best solution to a lot of things,” van der Zande said in response to a question about the team’s future. “And yeah, we’re just having the time of our life. My family is here. Nick is a great teammate.

“We have a great team, and we’re trying to win races…and that’s what we just did. So (we’re) enjoying the moment a lot!”

Images © IMSA