| “What happens a little bit as the year goes on – we had good races last year, but for one reason or another, we didn’t get a result to show for it – and then as the year builds, that frustration grows a little bit. You feel like those races that you had good races going and didn’t have the result to show for it, you start to reach a little bit to make something happen. Then that becomes your focus – just getting those wins. Which obviously for us, that didn’t work last year and in different years that I’ve won championships and years that I’ve had success and years that I haven’t had success.“I’ve been doing it long enough now that you realize that racing – as Doug Fehan always says – is 50 percent great team, great driver, great preparation, and 50 percent luck. Oftentimes, if you’re trying too hard to make something happen, then you’re not achieving what you’re setting out to do. So, if you think about putting yourself in the best position at the end of the race, whether that’s second, third, fourth, or whatever it may be, if you put yourself in that position, then you’re giving yourself a chance to win the race as opposed to trying to make something happen that maybe is not in the cards for that day. It goes both ways. You can have an extraordinary race and really overachieve in many ways and you get the win that way, but it was not working out that way for us last year.“So, a little bit of a different mentality. Again, I felt like we had chances to win last year that didn’t quite work in our favor. We’ve had chances to win both of the first races this year as well and it didn’t fall our way. So, not getting frustrated with that, leaning on the fact that we have good race cars, and we’ve had good races. One of these times, it will turn around. I’ve never been a very superstitious kind of person. I didn’t realize I hadn’t won in IMSA since 2020-2021. So it’s been a little while since then. Mostly, you lean back on the team’s performance, my performance, that kind of stuff. I’ve had some good races, had some bad ones too, but I think mostly, learning every race, trying to improve myself every race, continuing on that path and one of these days it will turn around for sure.”What are you looking forward to most? What’s the kind of an advantage that you guys can see in yourselves coming into Laguna that you guys can kind of take and hopefully eradicate that five-year win drought? “With Corvette Racing and Pratt Miller, it’s the strength of the team, the strength of the engineering staff there, all the men and women on the team. I’ve said since day one with this team that I feel like every time I’m at the track, they provide me a chance to win the race. Nicky and Sims are in the sim right now, the DIL (Driver In The Loop) sim in Charlotte. So, they’re getting some time trying to find as much laptime as they can with some setup options for us. We always lean on our strengths. And I feel like right now the team’s working well together, Nicky, myself, Alexander and Antonio as well, we gel well together and have a lot of fun at the racetrack and push each other to be better and better. That’s all we can do, is just focus on ourselves… figure out once we get going here, what our strengths and weaknesses are, and then from there build a plan for the race that we think is going to either keep us up front if that’s where we are pace-wise, or if we’re not quite the quickest then then looking for a strategy for the race that can provide us a chance to be more towards the front there as well. So, hopefully a little bit of good luck with that paint scheme from the days of the C5-R when that thing was winning everything. And really put our foot forward for the rest of the season, with the first of the sprint races here in IMSA.” What’s the one area track you think you can kind of gain the most with that Corvette as opposed to everybody else?“The way our Corvette has been this year, and in previous years as well, braking performance is quite strong. We have some of our aero back for this race so that’s always been a strength. So the drive up the hill, Turn Five and Turn Six, is usually pretty quick for us. Rainey Curve has been good. We’ll see how we look once we’re on the racetrack and how we compare, but that’s always been sort of our strengths. It’s tough, the drive up the hill. Laguna is not a very fast racetrack in the sense there’s not a long straightaway. We barely get into sixth gear there. But up the hill from Turn Five all the way to the Corkscrew still requires a pretty powerful engine to find laptime. So yeah, we’ll see how we fare once we get to the weekend.” |
