Ready for the off!
Well, here we are ready for Race Day at the Rolex 24 at Daytona and the week has gone pretty well so far. We’ve had the usual ups and down with the car, and a few little problems here and there, but it’s been generally trouble free. The car is still very, very new and everyone is still trying to dial themselves into that but we’ve done a reasonable amount of testing here and have a reasonably comfortable set up.
Qualifying
Antonio did a great, solid job in qualifying and got us fifth on the grid. At one point it looked as though we might be in the top three but the tyres seem to be hard to read and know when they were at their peak; if everything had gone just right, we might even have been challenging for the pole. It’s great that all the Corvette DP cars are right there in the hunt – it seems there are 9 or 10 cars which have the pace to win the race.
Fog Factor and Tyre Wear
It’s going to be unbelievably hard and very difficult, particularly in the night if there’s fog or rain or changeable conditions. It doesn’t look as though we’ll get rain but there’s a strong chance of fog in the early morning between, say, 5am and 9am so the chances are we’ll have some fog issue and we’ll be driving round under the safety car till it clears. We’ll see what happens. A few people are marginal on tyres and rear tyre wear seems to be a problem for a few people. We will be wary of that and maybe double stint left side tyres but that might not be necessary if it’s foggy for a long time!
Traffic, traffic, traffic
Traffic will be a major issue and we’re expecting a lot of yellows. The team that wins this race will be the one that has no contact at all and manages to have a clean run or has as little as possible and manages the yellows. With 45 GT cars out there it does make it very tough and the fact that the speed of the DP and GT cars on the straight is very close. It seems that in every series we race in at the moment it seems there’s little straight line speed difference between the classes and that’s something every series needs to address as it makes the racing that little bit harder and challenging, especially for less experienced drivers. They might not have the best way of passing people and they take desperate measures and that’s when accidents and incidents happens.
