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So if Corvette Racing Wins so much, What happened at the Rolex 24?
Have been a Corvette Racing fan for more than 15 years, going back to the LeMans winning teams.
Chevrolet Racing has the best pit crew as was shown multiple times during the 2017 Rolex 24 at Daytona. They would come in 3rd or 4th and then leave pit row in 1st place. Then the Ford GT, the Porsche 911 RSR and the Ferrari 488 GTE would pass them on the high banked "speedway" portion of the track. The Corvette team can simply look at those cars and see the smaller frontal area, specifically on the Ford GT which leads to better aerodynamics.
Coming in 4th, not even on the podium, should be a wake up call for Chevrolet. Pratt and Miller had better get going on the C8.R mid-engine if General Motors wants to be competitive in the GTLM class. If that is going to arrive in 2019 then it's going to be another year of non-podium finishes for Corvette Racing.
Have been a Corvette Racing fan for more than 15 years, going back to the LeMans winning teams.
Chevrolet Racing has the best pit crew as was shown multiple times during the 2017 Rolex 24 at Daytona. They would come in 3rd or 4th and then leave pit row in 1st place. Then the Ford GT, the Porsche 911 RSR and the Ferrari 488 GTE would pass them on the high banked "speedway" portion of the track. The Corvette team can simply look at those cars and see the smaller frontal area, specifically on the Ford GT which leads to better aerodynamics.
Coming in 4th, not even on the podium, should be a wake up call for Chevrolet. Pratt and Miller had better get going on the C8.R mid-engine if General Motors wants to be competitive in the GTLM class. If that is going to arrive in 2019 then it's going to be another year of non-podium finishes for Corvette Racing.
HH
What do you mean "another year of non podium finishes"?For starters, they went 1 and 2 at Daytona last year and won the 12 hours of Sebring right after that.
Well we know they aren't winning because of favorable BOP, but others are. As to changing their platform, Corvette Racing is one of the driving forces in how the street car is done. For example, front breathing C6 was driven by CR needing a front breathing car to remain competitive. Likewise direct injection in the C7.
The bigger issue is the erratic enforcement of rules and you only have to look at the prototype being passed off as a street car - the Ford GT. They started with their prototype and reverse engineered a street car which has yet to be delivered more than a year after they were allowed to race. Ironically it was Ford complaints in 1965 that Ferrari hadn't built enough 250GTLM to homologate (and they built more than Ford has of GT) that kept Ferrari from entering as a homologated entry.
The secret to Corvette success is no secret; professionalism, attention to detail, the best pit crews and team members. I've been at tests and in the hot pits many many times and the team is a testimony to never giving up, ever.
Have been a Corvette Racing fan for more than 15 years, going back to the LeMans winning teams.
Chevrolet Racing has the best pit crew as was shown multiple times during the 2017 Rolex 24 at Daytona. They would come in 3rd or 4th and then leave pit row in 1st place. Then the Ford GT, the Porsche 911 RSR and the Ferrari 488 GTE would pass them on the high banked "speedway" portion of the track. The Corvette team can simply look at those cars and see the smaller frontal area, specifically on the Ford GT which leads to better aerodynamics.
Coming in 4th, not even on the podium, should be a wake up call for Chevrolet. Pratt and Miller had better get going on the C8.R mid-engine if General Motors wants to be competitive in the GTLM class. If that is going to arrive in 2019 then it's going to be another year of non-podium finishes for Corvette Racing.
HH
The forum had similar posts after the Rolex 24 (mostly in the C7 forum) so I'll repeat some of what I said on those threads.
First, I agree that the Corvette "team" including the Pitt crew is outstanding, and probably the best there is.
That said, being a good team, unfortunately, was not the reason the pit stops were that much quicker. The series regulates fuel flow in an effort for all teams to be able to fill up the tank the same speed (they also regulate tank size and it varies as the balance the other performance) with the goal that the each team can go roughly the same laps at top performance and takes the same time to refuel.
In IMSA, you can fuel at the same time as the other work. All the pro teams can get their normal pit work (change tires, driver change, tear-off on window) in the time it takes to fuel, so what the Corvette team had going for it was fueling faster, which will be balanced in the next races and that advantage will go away. Note that at Le Mans, fueling occurs separately from the other work, being quick at the other items pays off some, unlike in IMSA (unless you can't get all the work down during fueling).
Likewise, as the cars performance are balanced, there is no reason to state that the Corvette team will struggle this year for any reason. Corvette won the team, drivers, endurance and manufacturers championship last year against the very same competition. The Corvette (like every car in the class) can go faster than the series allows if left "open". The problem we are seeing, as you properly noted, is that the Fords and Ferraris have a bigger advantage on the high speed, low down force tracks than they do on the other tracks, so the series' attempts to balance the cars doesn't work there without additional changes. We saw the same thing at Le Mans last year, and since those are the only two races to work with for the high speed/low downforce races, the series doesn't yet have enough data to make the right decision. The rest of the year's races(outside of Le Mans) should not have a similar imbalance, as they have all of last year for all of the cars (except the Porsche which is new) to try to make the cars equal.
So, as I've said several times on this forum, no one should be too high on Corvette Racing if they are much faster than the other teams, or too low if they are slower. Those things just mean that the series had done a poor job in their objective to balance the cars. What you should be happy with, is when all the cars are about equal, and Corvette still wins, such as what happened in several races last year. That means the series did its job in balancing the cars, and the Corvettes won on strategy, teamwork, driving, reliability and consistency.
I will never be able to figure out BOP. I know its needed but really?
The 911 was running a mid engine. How is this production car based? Looking in the back of the 911? with the rear bumper cover off, you could see the tub had an area for a spare tire where the engine should have been.
It would not surprise me if the year the C8 comes out GTLM goes away replced by exclusively GTD/GT3.
02-15-2017, 02:00 PM
Why Does the Corvette Racing Team Win so Much?
