DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Throughout the first two days of the Roar Before The Rolex 24 test at Daytona Int’l Speedway, the four Cadillac DPi-V.R race cars have resided at or near the top of the time charts.
In fact, through Saturday night’s fifth IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship practice session, a Cadillac has led every session, topped by a best overall lap of 1 minute, 36.973 seconds (132.154 mph) by Felipe Nasr in the No. 31 Whelen Engineering Cadillac DPi in the fourth session on Saturday afternoon. Defending series and race champion Jordan Taylor was able to pinpoint why Cadillac has been so strong prior to the Saturday night session.
“Obviously, we’re coming back for a second year with our car,” said the driver of the No. 10 Konica Minolta Cadillac DPi. “As a team, we’ve been racing here for 10-15 years, so we have a lot of experience here at Daytona and with this package, so we expected to come on strong. As the testing has gone on – we started at the front, and everyone is kind of working their way up towards where we are.
“Our increments of improvement are very small, because we have our car pretty well sorted, and everyone else is taking big chunks. I think by the end of tomorrow, it’s going to be a pretty tight field. I think it’s cool to see all the European guys, the European teams and drivers, adapting to what we’re used to and they’re adapting quickly. I think it’s going to be a good race at the end of the month.”
Sunday’s on-track activities on the final day of the Roar will include a qualifying session that will determine each team’s pit and garage selection for the race weekend on Jan. 25-28. Taylor, who will go for his second consecutive Rolex 24 victory with an entirely new pair of co-drivers in Renger van der Zande and IndyCar star Ryan Hunter-Reay, isn’t sure what the qualifying session will show in terms of performance of other cars, but is satisfied with the No. 10 setup.
“It’s hard to tell what everyone is doing pace-wise,” he said. “I think for us, we’re just focusing on our own program. We can trust in our drivers and our engineers and team and understand that we think we have a good car. From a driver point of view, it’s comfortable to drive. We’ve improved the car from last year from a drivability point of view, so for us, we feel comfortable and we’ll just have to wait and see what everyone else can bring to the race weekend.”
Weather has made national news throughout the first week of 2018, and made things difficult – if not impossible – for some in the Northeastern United States to travel anywhere. In fact, a midweek snow storm did delay No. 67 Ford Chip Ganassi Racing Ford GT driver Ryan Briscoe’s travel to the Roar, before he finally got to town Friday, a day later than expected.
“We got about a foot of snow where I live in Connecticut,” Briscoe said. “The day I was meant to be here at the track, I was actually at home plowing snow and working pretty hard out in the wind and stuff, but I enjoy that. Thankfully, the airport opened up in Hartford and I was able to get down here. I only missed the first one-hour session, so I didn’t really miss too much. It’s been really good to get back in the race car.”
The late start to the weekend hasn’t hampered his on-track performance, though, as the Australian posted the quickest lap of the test in the WeatherTech Championship GT Le Mans (GTLM) class Saturday afternoon before teammate Sebastien Bourdais eclipsed it by approximately two-tenths of a second in Saturday’s evening session at 1 minute, 43.798 in the No. 66 Ford GT. Briscoe is still pleased with the car’s performance, though.
“It’s been going really well,” Briscoe said. “A big change for us, at least on the 67 car, is we’ve got quite a lot of new personnel, so we’ve really just been trying to get everyone up to speed with the car. Everyone has a ton of experience, but maybe not necessarily on the GT. It’s been really good for that. The car’s been running well.
“We’ve been making a lot of setup changes, but we seem to keep coming back to a baseline. The car’s been quite good straight out of the truck. We’ve been really happy. Richard is missing a lot of it because he’s fallen sick, so hopefully he gets better soon. Other than that, I think everything’s been going quite smoothly.”
Source : speedsport.com
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