DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Prior to the 2017 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season, James French had never won a race in the Prototype Challenge class.
That changed in a big, big way in 2017.
In his third full season aboard the No. 38 Performance Tech Motorsports ORECA FLM09, French and teammates Patricio O’Ward, Kyle Masson and Nick Boulle opened the year with a dominating PC class victory in the Rolex 24 At Daytona. For French, it was an especially sweet victory.
“We had really bad luck there in the past, but it just felt like everything came together and we were finally able to put that bad luck behind us,” French said. “We had two new drivers – we had Pato, who was only 17 at the time, which was insane – and we had Kyle, who was 19 at the time. Nick was another young guy.
“(The team was) joking, but they said I was the ‘old man’ of the team, which was kind of a strange role to play since I was only 24 at the time, and I’m 25 now. It was kind of a weird role, but it was awesome having the young people with me and a ton of talent. I’d been with the team for so long up to that point that the ‘old man’ role kind of made sense. It was my third season with the team and just knowing them for so long and knowing how badly they really wanted to win, it was a really special one.”
That French was able to embrace the “old man” role at the ripe old age of 25 paid dividends in the Rolex 24. He was able to relate his own, still very recent experiences to his young teammates, which accelerated the learning curve for the whole team.
“I had different coaches and I had a lot of really good co-drivers, so I was able to learn a lot in that environment,” French said. “I’ve been through it and I know the things that worked for me and the things that didn’t throughout the year, so I feel like I’m able to pick out what works and give people the accelerated version.
“’OK, this is the easiest way to pick it up. This is what you should worry about. This is what you shouldn’t worry about.’ I just tried to make it as easy as possible for everybody. I feel like the teammates I had struggled a lot less than I did (when starting out). They picked it up extremely quickly. They were really comfortable right off the bat, so they made that part of it easy for me.”
Both full-season teammate, O’Ward, and Tequila Patrón North American Endurance Cup teammate, Masson, definitely picked it up quickly, because they went on to win the next race – the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring – as well. Then French and O’Ward went on to win all the other races (with Masson again in the Sahlen’s Six Hours of The Glen) and the trio went into the season-ending Motul Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta looking to sweep the PC class for the entire season before an incident ended their bid.
Source : speedsport.com
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