NICK TANDY, NO. 4 MOBIL 1/SiriusXM CHEVROLET CORVETTE C8.R: “So far so good. The first couple of stints were quite good. There obviously was a yellow early when everyone needed to stop in GTD. So it was good to experience the whole field coming in together. On our side it’s running pretty well. We’re finding that when we are in a pack, we aren’t too bad because we can draft off the cars in front. We seem pretty strong in the infield. It just becomes a bit different when we drop off the back of the pack; it looks like some of the leaders seem to stretch out their legs a little bit.”HOW MUCH ARE YOU LEARNING ABOUT THE GTD CORVETTE? “We were learning every session. We know the car. We know a lot about everything to do with how it operates. We know the tires. We’ve tested on the tires. We’ve tested the ABS and things like this. What we’re learning here is how everything translates and works together at Daytona with Daytona-specific aero requirements, suspension, geometry settings and tire pressures. This was something we’ve been learning throughout the week. The key thing is getting the car to work with the tire. That can vary from track to track how you make the most of it. It’s very different than before where we could select the tire we wanted and effectively develop the tire around our Corvette in GTLM. Now we have to work the car around the tire we’re given, which everyone does in GTD. This is one of the key differences.”WITH MORE CARS IN THE CLASS, IS IT DIFFERENT? “Yep! So far, I haven’t experienced too much of it to be honest. We had kind of a clean start and we were more to the front of the pack. But I’ve just seen on a restart there was a mix of cars – some had pitted and some had stayed out. When there are 35 cars by design that are capable of doing the same lap time in a space like Daytona, plus the other 30 cars out there, that’s something very new for us. It was kind of the like the GRAND-AM days when there were two separate classes. This is probably somewhat similar. In the last few years, we’ve had four or five classes and all the cars had a different spread. Now there’s a much bigger group that are all similar speed. That was really the first time we’ve seen the grid mixed up on a restart. Hopefully it’s not going to carry on like that.” | |