“I think at the time Ford had made a decision to build… ironically, it was an economy market, if we look back then, and Ford’s target was small engines. That's what the Probe was about. The chassis was a state-of-the-art, first carbon-fiber car built, designed by Paul Brown, it was a lovely car. It was a solid project but like many things we were running a small engine up against a lot of big power engines. I think the difficulty perhaps, what was visually seen, we were always blindingly quick and we had some reliability issues with it but developing a small four-cylinder engine like that... And what happened, actually, I think it was the winter period, there was an advancement, of course, with Porsche and the Nissan project and suddenly, where we’d been running at the time I think it was 600 hp and everything was looking good. But soon, it didn't make any difference – over the winter we needed 800 hp to remain competitive.”

As they were forced to extract more power from the tiny 4-cylinder engine, its ability to stay in one piece was jeopardized. “Well, you know we went 1.8, 1.9, 2 liters, 2.1. And the engine project was full on. And it did take time… it's pretty frustrating because we were trying to build a vision of a customer car program at the same time internally, and we were trying to run the four-cylinder to do with the economy really, the market was… tended towards small cars, small car engines. It took a while to get it to work. We sometimes backed off the power and ran and finished, finishing fourth and fifth didn't sort of take the box. Had to win from the front so went back to pushing it from the front.”


As much as times and technology have changed, Dawson says the parallels between the ALMS and IMSA GTP are many. “I think that whole era of GTP racing was stunning really. When you look back on it you got all the major car manufacturers in there and multiple teams. And it's funny when you come back and look at this and everyone says, “Wow, you’ve got big car manufacturers in there.” But you look back – I say unfortunately, I have to think of myself standing here 20 plus years ago in IMSA – and you had five car manufacturers here and they're all going at it head-to-head. And the other thing is you had the tire manufacturers. So it was a great, great project, great time.