MOTORSPORT: Corvettes outclass new Ford GT

While General Motors has become even more successful in GT Le Mans racing today with its Chevrolet Corvettes, Ford is consoling itself that its two new GTs at least lasted twice around the clock on debut at Daytona in Florida.

Corvette Racing’s two C7.Rs finished just 0.034sec apart after 24 hours on a 5.696km Daytona course combining flat track and banked speedway. The first of Ford’s new turbocharged V6 GTs were 32 laps (or more than 180km) behind.

The second Ford GT, in which Australian Ryan Briscoe was the lead driver, finished 162 laps (or almost 925km) down on the Corvettes.

In a week during which Australia motorsport eyes turn to our own GT race, the Bathurst 12 Hour, it’s entries from the likes of the factory Corvettes and Ford GT squad that could move the local race to the next level.

The Corvettes in particular have a heritage that could impress at Mt Panorama.

Last year the Corvettes won the class not only at Daytona but America’s other endurance classic, the Sebring 12-Hour, as well as the big one, the Le Mans 24-Hour in France.

While the rules under which the cars race are not identical to the Bathurst 12 Hour, they are close. A GT3-spec Corvette is far from an unlikely proposition.

At Daytona, GT LM cars (effectively an alternate to GT3) filled seventh to 12th places outright behind the outright victor, a Ligier-Honda LMP2 sports car that completed 736 laps or almost 4200km, and five Daytona prototypes – three of them Corvette-powered, the other by Ford Ecoboost.

The GT LM Corvettes, in which Brit Oliver Gavin and Spaniard Antonio Garcia fought out a thrilling finish (and the Porsche 911 RSR in which New Zealander Earl Bamber drove the final stint), took the chequered flag 14 laps down on the Ligier-Honda that had new Brazilian wonderboy Pipo Derani at the wheel.

That gave Honda its first overall victory in the Daytona classic. The car was entered by Scott Sharp’s Florida-based Extreme Speed Motorsports.

A further lap back were two of the new turbocharged GT LMs – a Ferrari 488 and a BMW M6, with another 488 next but another 12 laps down.

The twin-turbocharged 3.5-litre V6 Ford GTs, were mainly troubled by gearbox problems but also had brake issues. They were classified seventh and ninth of the 11 starters in GT LM and 31st and 40th outright.

Briscoe said he was sure “everyone involved [with the Ford supercar racing project, taking it back to Le Mans in June, 50 years after its first outright victory there] will be able to work out the kinks that we got in our first-ever race with the Ford GT”.

Dave Pericack, global director of Ford Performance, said: “I don’t think anyone should think of this race as a failure.

“It’s not the Cinderella story we were hoping for, but this is racing. [But] I’d rather work the bugs out now than later.

“We will re-group, we will fix it, and then we will go out at Sebring [in mid-March] and show what we can do. That’s what this is all about.

“At its core, this is a race machine. Our drivers have confirmed it. Our results when we have been on track have confirmed it. Our engineering analysis has confirmed it.

“These nagging things are frustrating as hell, but at the end of the day we have an amazing machine and that [dual finish] is a victory in itself.

“We will get it durable and then we will race the hell out of it.”

Raj Nair, Ford’s chief technical officer and vice-president of global product development, said that reliability issues were “not uncommon in a brand new [race] car’s debut”.

Nair said the sleek Ford GTs had only been on track against opposition for the first time in Daytona’s three-day ‘Roar before the 24’ trial three weeks earlier.

“Aspects of our total testing program had gone very well, so we’re a little surprised at some of the reliability issues we have had [in the race],” Nair said.

“There’s no replacement for race conditions.

“The good thing is the car is showing some pace, it is showing some opportunity, and overall we are happy that we have a fast car and we need to work on reliability. That’s a lot better than having a slow car that’s reliable...”

The GT LM Corvettes produced the closest class finish in the 54 years of the Daytona classic.

Corvette Racing chief Doug Fehan let Gavin and Garcia race each other to the chequered flag, with the Spaniard (who had pitted for new tyres with 37 minutes to go) twice briefly getting his nose ahead of the Brit.

“What you saw today was simply the two best road racers in the world with the two best cars in the world,” Fehan said.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find a better race than this. You don’t spend 23.5 hours working this hard and not let those guys continue to race.”

Gavin said it had been a great duel but “all I could think about was Doug Fehan and what he would say if we touched”.

“Then on the last lap I was thinking I had just enough on him (Garcia), but then he towed up behind me,” Gavin said.

“It was like the line was just going away from me. I couldn’t get to the line fast enough. It was pretty close.”

German Rene Rast (who along with Kiwi Bamber) is now headed to the Bathurst 12-Hour, in which he has replaced the injured Craig Lowndes, took the chequered flag first in the GT Daytona class in which 22 cars started.

Italian Fabio Babini in one of five new Lamborghini Huracans in the race ran out of fuel after having overtaken Rast in the Utah-based Magnus Racing’s Audi R8 LMS nine minutes from the finish.