LEXINGTON -- Corvette Racing is joining the fray.
After dominating the GT1 class in the American Le Mans Series over the last decade, winning 77 class races and eight straight championships, the team is jumping into the highly competitive GT2 ranks.
"I know questions are going to be out there, why the move? It should be fairly obvious to most who follow the sport that throughout the last decade after we dispatched the Viper and the Saleen and Ferrari and then finally Aston Martin, there was literally very little competition on a global basis to race in the existing GT1 category," Corvette Racing Program Manager Doug Fehan said.
Essentially everyone was racing for third place as Corvette Racing put out a pair of world-class cars at each event. Just this summer, the GT1 Corvette won the 24 Hours of Le Mans for the sixth time.
Over the last few years, the racing turned into intramurals between the Nos. 3 and 4 Compuware cars as the other manufacturers dropped out.
"The past couple of years people think we haven't been pushing ourselves very hard, but you never race anyone harder than your teammate, especially when you have the exact same stuff," factory driver Johnny O'Connell said.
He and teammate Jan Magnussen indeed had a memorable on-track battle with fellow Corvette racers Oliver Gavin and Olivier Beretta at last year's Acura Sports Car Challenge at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. They got after each other so hard, race officials penalized them a lap for rough driving.
Now they'll not only have each other to race against, they'll have 10 more cars challenging them. Among the marques on the track will be Porsche 911 GT3s, BMW E92 M3s, a Ferrari 430 GT, a Dodge Viper, a Panoz Esperante-Ford and a Doran-Ford with a Roush-Yates engine.
"The cars lap times might be a little slower (compared to GT1), but if you look at the resumes of the drivers (in GT2), they are every bit as strong as those in the prototypes," O'Connell said. "You have some brilliant drivers competing there and some very strong teams with a lot of experience."
Rahal Letterman Racing has drivers Joey Hand, Bill Auberlen, Dirk Mueller and Tommy Milner in BMWs, while the class of the field are points leaders Jorg Bergmeister and Patrick Long in the Flying Lizard Porsches. Jaime Melo and Pierre Kaffer are second for Risi Competizione in a Ferrari, while Dominik Farnbacher and Ian James are ranked third for Panoz Team PTG.
Mid-Ohio hosted a 50-year celebration of the Corvette a few years ago. This weekend will be another seminal moment for the famous American sports car as the new Corvette C6-R makes its racing debut in Lexington.
It is more closely linked to the cars fans see on the streets and highways as it is a production-based machine.
"If my e-mail is any indication, it's going to be a crazy weekend," O'Connell said. "Corvette owners across the country and in Europe and everywhere else are gaga for this car."
They plan on relishing the new challenge and the chance to possibly be the underdog.
"We change continually and we are going racing against Ferrari, against BMW, against Porsche, and I think it will be a lot of fun. It will be very tough at the beginning because those guys have a lot of experience in the category," Beretta said.
So they acknowledge it will take some time to sort out. They know the car is good, but they're unsure about how it compares to the other cars at various points on the track.
"It would be very cool to get a car on the podium -- hopefully the No. 3 car," O'Connell said. "But we're realistic, knowing we're kind of the new kids on the block with a ton of experience, but we're going to have to figure out how these guys race.
"We'll come away from this weekend with a lot of experience that hopefully will mean in a couple of races we'll once again be the guys that everyone is chasing."
source: mansfieldnewsjournal
