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Re: Sports car racing
Yes, and yes, it does help production cars.
I've done a bit of work with one of the former drivers for the Hyundai factory Motorola Cup (now Grand-Am cup) team, and due to the rules, over the course of the year there were several parts and updates that they asked for that made it to the production Hyundai Tiburon. Think about how much the reliability and performance of the Tiburon improved inthe late 90's-early 00's, and I think a large part of that can be directly attributed to the factory involvement in production racing. Other examples include:
Cadillac CTS-V (SPEED World Challenge)
Corvette C6 (ALMS/Le Mans)
Subaru Impreza (JGTC)
BMW E46 (ETCC)
and I'm sure there are a lot more that I could come up with given a bit more time.
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2004 Subaru Impreza WRX STI (daily driver) 
1999 Mazda Miata (track car, slow, but finished the SCCA Runoffs) 
1987 Porsche 944 (being rebuilt) 
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