Ganassi's entry into sportscar racing came alongside its partnership with Felix Sabates beginning in 2001, fielding Lexus-badged Toyota-Riley Daytona Prototypes. Scott Pruett became the anchor driver, forming a long-running partnership with Mexican driver Memo Rojas that would define the program's championship era.
The team won the 2006 Rolex 24 at Daytona with Ganassi IndyCar drivers Dan Wheldon and Scott Dixon, plus NASCAR driver Casey Mears — crossing multiple divisions of the Ganassi organization. A second consecutive Daytona win followed in 2007 with Scott Pruett, Juan Pablo Montoya, and Salvador Duran. Ganassi thus became the first owner to win the Rolex 24 in back-to-back years since Al Holbert in 1986 and 1987.
The run continued in 2008 with a third straight Daytona victory, and the team also won the Grand-Am Championship that year, with Pruett and Rojas. Pruett's title was his eighth road racing championship. Rojas became the first Mexican driver to win a major road racing title in North America.
For 2010 the team switched from Lexus-Riley to BMW-Riley machinery. Rojas and Pruett produced one of the most dominant seasons in Grand-Am history, winning nine of twelve races on the way to the championship title.
The 2011 season opened with Ganassi achieving a one-two finish at the Rolex 24 at Daytona. Scott Pruett and Memo Rojas won in the 01 car, defeating Scott Dixon and Graham Rahal in the 02 entry. The result made Chip Ganassi the first team owner ever to win all four of North America's most prestigious motorsport events — the Daytona 500, Indianapolis 500, Brickyard 400, and 24 Hours of Daytona — within a twelve-month span.
By that point the team had accumulated five Grand-Am sports car championships, with Pruett and Rojas forming one of the defining driver pairings of the Daytona Prototype era.
When Grand-Am and the American Le Mans Series merged to form the United SportsCar Championship in 2014, Ganassi fielded a Riley-Ford Daytona Prototype for Pruett and Rojas in the inaugural season, winning three races. For 2015, Joey Hand replaced Rojas, and the team also assembled an "all-star" Daytona entry combining drivers from across the broader Ganassi operation.
The Daytona Prototype program was retired heading into 2016 when the team transitioned fully to the GTLM class, deploying the new factory Ford GT. Dirk Müller partnered with Joey Hand in one car, while Ryan Briscoe and Richard Westbrook drove the second GT. Pruett, the long-standing face of the program, no longer had a role as the new era required full factory GT talent. As a farewell to the DP era, the team brought out the Riley machinery one final time for the 2016 Rolex 24, before shutting down the prototype program entirely.
The Ford GT GTLM program extended Ganassi's IMSA presence while simultaneously contributing to the Ford Chip Ganassi Racing effort in the FIA World Endurance Championship. Ford announced at the 2015 24 Hours of Le Mans that it would return to La Sarthe in 2016 under the Ford Chip Ganassi Racing name, with Multimatic Motorsports Europe handling the European campaign under the Ford Chip Ganassi Team UK banner.
In both 2016 and 2017 the combined Ford GT effort earned podium finishes in the FIA GT Manufacturers' classification, placing third in 2016 and second in 2017.
Chip Ganassi Racing's IMSA footprint — built through the Grand-Am years on the strength of the Pruett-Rojas partnership and the dominance of the BMW-Riley — established the organization as the benchmark for multi-discipline North American racing teams. The program produced more 24 Hours of Daytona victories across consecutive seasons than any team in the modern prototype era, and the transition through Ford's GT program into global endurance competition demonstrated the scope of ambition that defined Ganassi's sportscar program.