It’s all hands on deck right now at VISIT FLORIDA Racing.
At the team’s shop in Daytona Beach, Florida on Wednesday, Team Owner Troy Flis described the timeline faced by the No. 90 VISIT FLORIDA Multimatic/Riley crew.
“Our engineer flew in today and the guys are making good progress on the car,” Flis said. “Our electrical guy will be here tomorrow to finish up a couple odds and ends but I believe by Friday, the car will be done. We’ll load up Friday night and we’re hoping to test on Monday to shakedown the car on the way to [Circuit of The Americas].”
The VISIT FLORIDA team has been scrambling for almost three weeks to prepare a new car for the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship race at Circuit of The Americas (COTA) next week, after an incident at Long Beach in early April forced the team to withdraw from the race. Renger van der Zande was behind the wheel and had just completed his 19th lap during morning practice when the car slammed into the Turn 1 wall, causing irreparable damage to the Multimatic/Riley chassis.
“Right now, it’s still under review,” Flis explained. “We lost the brake pressure in our front brakes and we aren’t positive about what happened there. The car came back in after the incident and there were no lines broken, no visual part failure and a lot of the time there is. We haven’t found the smoking gun and that’s very disheartening to us because we just don’t know.”
What the team does know is that it faces an uphill battle for the rest of the 2017 season. With the Prototype class championship now out of realistic reach, the VISIT FLORIDA team is now focused on learning the ins and outs of its new-for-2017 Multimatic/Riley machine. The team started off the season strong with a third-place finish at Daytona, but an issue at Sebring led to a sixth-place finish.
“Our learning curve is very steep right now and we’re just trying to get the new cars to a competitive level,” Flis said. “It’s not like our old cars where we can just take everything off, bolt it on the other car and go again. Now it’s like every part that you take off, you have to second guess it three times and say ‘What can we do to make this part a little better before we put it back on the car so we can try to get a little more speed or reliability out of it?’”
Flis also acknowledged that the team can afford to take more risks than what their previous strategy would have allowed. Instead of settling for a top-three or top-five finish for solid points, rolling the dice to win races has now climbed up a few rungs on the team’s list of priorities.
“We’ll go for the win every single time to help our partners and try to get exposure,” Flis said. “It’s very hard to keep your partners and everyone upbeat and to keep your team, your drivers and everybody wanting to run up front, even when you’re not being competitive.”
But if there’s any team in the paddock that can do it, Flis is confident in the VISIT FLORIDA group’s ability to keep pushing. He emphasized the resiliency of his crew and the hard work the team has put in to prepare for COTA.
“Everyone on our team is professional so they all know this is part of the business and part of the industry,” Flis said. “For them to get the morale back is when we go back out there and we’re competitive. We have a great blend for the season with what we’re looking to get out of the car and with Marc (Goossens)’s knowledge and Renger’s speed. We’ve got to pick our heads up and on the engineering and management side, we have to give them a product they can win with.”
Even with their extraordinary effort, all eyes will be on the car’s performance heading into COTA, as the group is still unnerved about what caused the incident at Long Beach. Team sponsor VISIT FLORIDA was quick to relay their relief that van der Zande was unhurt in the heavy crash, and Flis and his crew have done everything in their power to prevent a repeat scenario, including collaborating with Mazda Motorsports, which runs the same brake package on its DPi car that uses the same basic chassis.
For now though, all the team can do is pack up its new car and head to the next race.
“It’s going to be an interesting year for sure,” Flis said. “But this team is strong and we’ll keep digging and get to the next one.”
Source : imsa.com
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