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CORVETTE RACING AT LONG BEACH: Robert Wickens & Tommy Milner

Media conference transcript ahead of landmark Corvette entry at Long BeachCorvette Z06 GT3.R drivers Robert Wickens and Tommy Milner met with members of the media via Zoom on Thursday afternoon. The pair discussed Wickens’ initial test and upcoming race debut with Corvette at the Grand Prix of Long Beach alongside Corvette Racing factory driver Milner in a DXDT Racing Corvette Z06 GT3.R equipped with Bosch’s state-of-the-art hand-control braking system.
ROBERT WICKENS, NO. 36 CHEVROLET CORVETTE Z06 GT3.RGIVE US YOUR FIRST THOUGHTS ON YOUR FIRST TIME IN THE CORVETTE.“So far I feel like a kid on Christmas. It’s been a lot of work so far. Yesterday I got my first taste of the Corvette Z06 GT3.R just before lunch. I got a couple of laps in, we stopped for a lunch break and then kind of hit the ground running in the afternoon. I felt like we finished in a good place yesterday and then thankfully a good night’s rest and a lot of planning ahead of today. So far today has been running super smooth. The biggest takeaway I have so far is that it feels like the Bosch EBS and the hand-control system developed by Pratt Miller belongs in his car. There hasn’t been a single hiccup. It’s like when they designed the Corvette Z06 GT3.R it was always in the plan. It looks like it belongs in the car. It feels like it belongs in the car. Immediately I felt way more comfortable with the braking feeling and braking sensation then I had in my past racing in TCR with the Bosch EBS. It was a massive step forward so hats off to all the men and women at Bosch, Pratt Miller, GM and DXDT Racing for collaborating in making this all possible.” HOW DOES THE CORVETTE COMPARE TO THE FORMULA E CAR YOU TESTED LAST YEAR?“Quite a bit different. The Formula E car was pretty much a temporary hand-control solution where we repurposed the re-gen paddles at the bottom of the steering wheel so one side was for throttle and one side was for braking. It worked but it wasn’t effective. Here, everyone put their heads together and we have a very well-integrated hand-control system where the paddles and everything… the sensation and feeling that I have, whenever I embarked on this journey to race with hand controls, I was always envisioning that hydraulic sensation with my hands when I’m applying the brake. Everyone involved made it happen. When you take a look at it, you’ll see there’s a damper on the top of my brake paddles. We’ve evolved and evolved, and now we’ve changed spring rates… it’s basically like you’re changing suspension settings. We have bump rubbers and packers. It’s teeny tiny things like surgeon work. It’s amazing the feeling that I have and I feel like I’m extracting a lot of pace because of it. The fact that I was straight away comfortable… frankly internally I was concerned that it might take me a little bit to get up to speed. But thankfully that wasn’t the case so far. There’s a lot of work to be done but so far the signs are positive.” HOW MUCH HAS YOUR TIME ON YOUR HOME SIMULATOR COME TO GRIPS WITH THIS NEW CHALLENGE?“I think racing on my home simulator is not only very fun, but it made my dexterity and kind of my resolution of my hand for throttle application in particular just stronger and stronger. After driving this Corvette Z06, I feel like the next step for me is actually to start doing more throttle application with my right hand just to build that muscle memory. Because for people that don’t know, I pretty much do like 98 percent of my throttle application with my left hand. So that way I can freely upshift with my right hand and then brake with my right hand and downshift with the left hand. So with this car, like with Turn Seven at Sebring… there’s a few corners here where I feel like I need to start practicing using throttle with both hands a little bit more. But yeah, the home simulator, it definitely didn’t hurt. Not only is it a lot of fun, but my brake that I use on my home simulator is very different to what we have in the race car. But for throttle purposes, I think it’s very helpful.” ON DRIVING A REAR-WHEEL DRIVE CAR AND USING PAST EXPERIENCE IN SINGLE-SEATERS AND DTM WITH THE CORVETTE GT3.“Yes and no. I feel at home in a rear-wheel-drive car. You know, I feel like I never left in a way. That being said, a TCR car with it being front-wheel drive, a lot of your instability moments it’s all kind of corner entry and mid-corner. By the time you apply throttle, you’re not really fighting the car. So it’s been an interesting adjustment here, trying to maintain a consistent throttle position while the rear is starting to slide or step out a little bit. So that’s taken some getting used to, and I still need to learn that. Sometimes I’ll get a snap oversteer, and I’ll accidentally lift off the throttle completely and just bleed loads of lap time. So, yeah, a lot to work on. But the biggest thing for me is understanding the traction control system that’s in this Corvette Z06 GT3.R because I haven’t really felt traction control for all my career. I’ve done some testing in GT3 from my time at Mercedes and some other stuff in a couple other race cars here and there. But in terms of extracting lap time from a proper traction control system and all the aids and assists that we have inside the car. Still trying to understand kind of what makes it click, because I think when I’m applying throttle, my resolution is not spot on yet. So I think I’m applying like 10 percent throttle, but I’m actually more like 30 percent, 35, 40 percent throttle. And I’m immediately getting traction control intervention, and the car is coping and handling it great and there’s no dramas. But I feel like it’s still catching me by surprise and it’s still something I need to keep working on.” DO YOU KNOW APPROXIMATELY HOW MANY MAN HOURS HAVE GONE INTO DEVELOPING THIS SYSTEM?“More than I’m sure I can imagine. It was a very motivating experience. But every time I was on weekly calls with Pratt Miller developing the controls, the physical paddles and the shapes and the ergonomics of everything, it was some of the busier Zoom meetings I’ve ever participated in. They’re all just all such intelligent people. With Bosch on it, DXDT all on the call, (team owner) David Askew with his engineering background and all being integrated into this build, it didn’t take one person. It took an army. And I think everyone just collaborated perfectly. And every single time I went down to Detroit to Pratt Miller Engineering to see the next 3D printed prototype of the ergonomics of everything, everyone I felt was just very motivated for the challenge. What made me feel great was I could tell that it was a motivation and not a distraction. You know, I feel like when I’ve been trying to get into these categories and trying to make a step into another race car… race teams are efficient operations. It’s not like there’s just a surplus of engineers to just take people and move around. So I was very grateful for the opportunity and, frankly, the timeline that they got it completed on was pretty astounding from start to finish.” ON TOMMY MILNER’S ROLE AND EXPERIENCE WITH THE CORVETTE Z06 GT3.R.“I’m going to be leaning on Tommy exclusively! I think once I finish here today, I’m probably going to try to book him in for a half-day Zoom call or something just to pick his brain on every nuance of the car. From getting to know Tommy a little bit and watching him shake down the car at The Firm around Daytona… he actually drove me from Daytona up to The Firm and back. So I was chewing his ear off and asking loads of questions about the car already then and that’s just going to carry on. “Hopefully he doesn’t get tired of me too soon, but I’m definitely going to be leaning on him for a lot of support because even now it’s this fine line where we’re trying to evolve the brake system and get the braking sensation, the spring rates and also the software side with Bosch and the EBS all dialed into the car. But in parallel I’m also still trying to learn what the car likes and how the car likes to be driven. When I did this in the TCR car, I had driven the TCR car for two years so I knew how to drive it and how to get laptime out so it was just solely trying to get the brake feel to what I wanted. Now it’s kind of a much more foggy experience because I feel like I’m learning both at the same time. We only have basically a day-and-a-half and we’re on to the launch. So there’s only an afternoon left before that’s all I get going into Long Beach. We’re getting through it quick. I did my first full just before lunch hence the sweatiness! But yeah so far so good. I got to kind of feel what a double-stinted Michelin felt like here at Sebring with mid-80s ambient temperature and stuff. These are all things I need to learn for my database because you don’t get an opportunity to test very often. So I’m trying to make sure I have as much information before I start the season.”WAS THERE ANYTHING ABOUT THIS CAR OR ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY OR ABOUT LONG BEACH THAT MADE THIS THE RIGHT TIME TO RETURN TO THE SERIES?“I guess all of the above. Frankly, for me, I wanted to get into the car as soon as possible. If there was a way to have driven the car in (Petit Le Mans) last year, I would have been all over it. The same for Daytona and the same for last weekend in Sebring. But good things take time. I think in the moment, I was frustrated but obviously I respect that you can’t rush something like this. It has to be done properly because also this is the product that I have to now use for the entire 2025 season. If you don’t have a strong foundation, you can just kind of set yourself up for failure. Although I was pushing and pushing and pushing to try to bump the timeline up as much as possible, it was very clear that we weren’t going to make the first two endurance races. With that said, the original plan was to debut at Laguna Seca, and we were able to bump it up to start in Long Beach. So I feel like that’s already a win in itself. “In terms of the car, it just took a group of people to believe that this is possible. I feel like when I was speaking to other teams, everyone thought it was a good idea. But it took David Askew at DXDT to take the leap of faith and say ‘You know what? I want to do this.’ And then we aligned with Pratt Miller, Bosch was already on my side, and they were fully supporting it, and then the fine people at General Motors all basically pulling together and saying ‘You know, let’s give this a shot and see what it can do.’ And I understand, I have a pretty small sample group of races in 2025 to try and prove myself, but my goal is to be a full-time staple in the IMSA WeatherTech Series for 2026 in the future.” THESE COMPANIES ARE INVOLVED IN A LOT OF RACING SERIES. DO YOU FEEL LIKE WHAT YOU’RE LEARNING NOW CAN BE APPLIED POTENTIALLY TO OTHER SERIES?“One hundred percent. What we’re learning here today can transfer into any race car and then hopefully down the road what we’re developing with the electronic braking system from Bosch, opportunities are endless that maybe this can evolve into road safety and into everyday road vehicles and accessibility in road vehicles. I feel like the opportunities are endless, but short-term we need to perfect this system here in the Corvette Z06 GT3.R. We’ll have to wait and see. The way Pratt Miller developed the actual brake control that I apply, it mounts to the steering column independent of the steering wheel. The steering wheel that Tommy will be driving or any other teammate that I drive with in this Corvette, it’s the exact same steering wheel that they always know. There’s just a bit of luggage on the backside. What’s great about it is in theory it can mount to virtually any steering column as long as you have the right bolt pattern. It actually fits the space of a steering spacer that would be on the steering column to change how close or far away the steering wheel would be to the driver. It was a very intuitive design and honestly sets up for future-proofing. If there’s other car opportunities where my paddles that I use could actually be transferable from car to car. That way I’m not learning the ergonomics of new controls every time I drive something different.” AS EACH STEP HAS COME FOR YOU IN THIS PROCESS, WHERE DOES THIS RANK FOR YOU IN TERMS OF YOUR GROWTH AND YOUR COMEBACK? DO YOU HAVE THINGS LEFT THAT YOU’D LIKE TO TRY?“I think there’s a lot of things left. My goal from the outset of this was to get back to the highest levels of motorsport again. I’ve always seen that the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship is the highest level of sports car racing here in North America. Aligning myself with someone like General Motors and DXDT Racing, it was just the perfect fit. It would be a dream if I could call it a 10-year career here in the IMSA WeatherTech series racing against the best drivers in the world and one of the best series in the world.“In terms of what’s left, there’s always opportunity. But my goal is always to get to the highest levels and I feel like I’m here. So the next step is to become a week-in, week-out staple of the series and make sure I can get myself to a full-time position for 2026 and then start fighting for championships. Hopefully we can challenge for race wins and podiums here this year. There’s no Sprint championship in the IMSA WeatherTech Championship, so we’re going to have to wait a year, hopefully go full-time and then try to make a full run at it. In terms of what’s left, I don’t know. It’s kind of a fun part of my career right now. With the help of Bosch, I feel like there are more opportunities than I thought I would have 12 to 24 months ago.” THE WAY YOU JUST TALKED ABOUT IMSA, DO YOU CONSIDER THIS LIKE YOU’VE MADE IT AND YOU’VE COME BACK?“I think this is a big step. For me to officially get that fulfillment, I want to be a full-time contender in the WeatherTech Series. Honestly taking the green flag in Long Beach is going to be an enormous step forward in my career and my journey back to the highest levels. Basically you could say ‘We did it. We’re racing against the best cars and the best drivers in the whole sports car industry’. So I want to win championships for myself, for General Motors, for DXDT. There’s still some work to be done. I think you could say it’s definitely a massive box to check, probably the biggest box that we could check off so far in my return.” ON THE WORK DONE DURING THE TEST AT SEBRING.“It’s been a lot. It’s been a long 36 hours. The big thing is getting acclimated into the car was kind of job Number One. Honestly, Bosch did so much preparation ahead of this that there wasn’t a whole lot. The first run with the system… if that was all I had and there was no tunability, I wouldn’t have been upset about it. We started off in such a great window where I kind of just got to figure out the race car. “We’re not doing a whole lot of setup work, but thankfully with the Sebring 12 Hours just finishing, the car feels great. We’re in a great balance window. DXDT was so quick on the weekend. They nearly had a shot at a podium there at the end. Yesterday morning, we had Spencer Pigot shake down the car and do some initial tests and installations because this was actually the first time that the Bosch EBS was integrated into the DXDT Corvette. We wanted to make sure that everything just worked according to plan, and they wanted an able-bodied person to do the initial shakedowns and the initial baseline run just to make sure that if there was an issue, they had the ability to apply brakes to get the car back safely. I got my first run in just before lunch yesterday… a little six-lap run to get a taste and then look at some data over lunch and hit the ground running in the afternoon. “Today’s been a lot more intense. An 8:30 start and basically never got out of the car for most of the morning. I got my first taste of a long run with double-stinted tires to see what the car behaves like. Like we talked about, this is my only test for the whole year and we want to make sure that I have as many tools on my belt as possible so there’s no surprises once we get into Long Beach or further down the road. The best thing about Sebring is a lot of these apex and exit curves are not super friendly. So you can kind of treat them like walls. So in terms of getting used to Long Beach, that’s been good. The apex at Turn One is a wall, so that’s pretty good too. So I feel like there’s a lot of stuff that we’re learning here that I can take with me to Long Beach. But then also the high-speed corners here in Sebring, like Turn One, I’m trying to think of how the car wants to act when I think down the road for Laguna Seca or Road America or Canadian Tire Motorsport Park where it’s a fast-flowing, committed track. We’re getting through it. We have another busy afternoon ahead of us with a lot of work to be had.” WHAT ARE YOU ANTICIPATING BEING THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES AT LONG BEACH FOR YOU?“I don’t know yet, to be honest. I think I won’t know until I’m in there. I mean, best-case scenario, I do my first runs and I’m only a handful of tenths off of Tommy and we’re in a window where we can keep chipping away. Until I’m in that environment, it’s hard to tell. For me, I’m just continuing to get used to the car here in Sebring and try to do as much preparation as possible and then just kind of see where we are.”
TOMMY MILNER, NO. 36 CHEVROLET CORVETTE Z06 GT3.RTELL US ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY THAT YOU AND ROBBIE HAVE HERE TOGETHER AND WHAT YOU’VE SEEN OUT OF HIM.“It’s super exciting for me to be a part of this effort with DXDT Racing and with Robbie in his first race in the Corvette. As Rob mentioned, I had the opportunity to drive The Firm after The Roar in the kind of initial shakedown of the Bosch EBS system in the Corvette. I obviously know who Robbie is and I followed his career for a long time. He had raced Formula BMW just before I had a long time ago. So I knew the name and kind of followed his career as time went on. You can tell that he’s still a racer at heart. And like he said, he was picking my brain about the Corvette constantly. More than anything, I’m excited to go back to Long Beach to join DXDT Racing again and then help Robbie here in his first race get up to speed with the Corvette.“From what I’ve heard already from some of the team down there, he’s already quite quick. If the team has put him on some double-stint tires and full tanks, he’s already kind of experienced probably the worst of what the Corvette is going to feel like, just based on our experience this last weekend at Sebring. Super-excited for him and super-excited for DXDT. It’s a cool opportunity for me as well to be a part of that with him and to go back to Long Beach again and go racing there again.” HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THIS PROGRAM TO SOMEONE WHO KNOWS NOTHING ABOUT IT, AND HOW DOES THAT CHANGE YOUR ROLE?“In Robbie’s case he has to do all of his driving with his hands, with him being paralyzed from the chest down. So he has no use of his feet. So this system is basically set up so that he can do all that with the steering wheel itself. There’s a brake ring and there are throttle paddles that take the place of what I would normally use in the pedal box. Those are some of the common questions that I’ve heard about this system when I’ve told people who know a little bit about racing but not this situation. “The system is quite impressive with how it functions and how it works. With just one push of a button, the system switches from the able-bodied driver controls to the hand controls, which obviously is important for sports car racing where we have driver changes. It’ll be especially important at Long Beach as we’ve always talked about the driver change being a pretty important part of the race because that typically ends up being kind of the limiting factor in the pit stop. The tires and the fuel typically take a little bit less than that time (to do a driver change). Robbie obviously comes from a place where he has the sports car racing experience, where he’s had to do those driver changes. From that side, there’s no real limitations, so to speak. He knows what he needs to get out of the car.“But fundamentally, everything happens on the wheel. And it’s a system that took me initially a little while to sort of understand in my own brain… how it is supposed to work, how to find laptime out of it and things like that. But the system is set up quite well to where by the end of the second day of testing that I had in the car to prove the system a bit, I was able to find quite a bit of lap time and get closer to what I was capable of with the normal able-bodied setup. So for someone like Robbie, who has as much racing experience as he does, as good as he was and still is, you can tell just from talking to him how focused he is on doing what he’s always done, which is drive race cars very fast. The system is designed to allow that to happen for him. His drive and determination are pretty incredible. It’s pretty inspiring to see that and I’m excited to go racing with him at Long Beach. ARE THERE ANY CHANGES TO HOW YOU TYPICALLY CLIMB INTO THE CAR WITH THE MODIFICATIONS?“No. The car will, for me, feel as if it’s the same Corvette that I’ve been in for many years. Like Robbie talked about, there’s a little bit more going on behind the wheel. But when I’m driving, I basically won’t even know that it’s there. Obviously that was done on purpose and done with the intention of making it as easy to use for Robbie, but also as easy to use for myself, essentially. So in practice and in reality, there should be no obvious signs other than an extra button box, that this Corvette is any different than any other Corvette that I’ve driven.” WHEN YOU WERE PRESENTED WITH THE OPPORTUNITY, HOW DID YOU LOOK AT IT? WAS IT A CHALLENGE? WAS IT AN OPPORTUNITY? WAS IT AN HONOR?“All of those things. More than anything, I would say an honor because I’ve met Robbie a couple of times over the years in the past and now have spent a lot more time with him recently just after Daytona. You can tell why he is successful in racing, why he was so successful prior to his incident as well. He’s just super focused on getting the most out of himself, out of the car team, that kind of thing. For me to be part of that story and that process, and hopefully give him a good foundation to do the next four races in IMSA this year, I do look at it as a challenge as well. I want to help him as best as I can, give him as much of the knowledge and information that I’ve gathered over the years driving this Corvette to give him the best opportunity to be successful.” ON THE BRAKE SYSTEM SETUPS. “When the car is in the able-bodied mode, it will feel just like every other Corvette Z06 GT3.R. The way that the system is set up – I’m not as technically advanced as maybe I should be with the system, and Robbie probably knows a lot more than I do – they’re essentially sort of like separate systems. When the able-bodied system is active, the pedal feels the same, throttle pedal and all that feels the same, and the steering wheel feels all the same. When the hand-control system is activated, then it goes through the EBS system, and then Robbie has his own brake bias, so the system will function slightly different in that way where if he needs a certain brake feel or brake distribution then it can be custom tuned so to speak for him. He can adjust that on the fly just like I would be able to with the normal hydraulic system. So when I’m driving the car it feels just like every other Corvette that I’ve driven before and when he’s driving it, it’s tuned for what he needs.” YOU SAY THE CAR IS JUST LIKE ANY OTHER CORVETTE, SO DOES THAT MEAN THERE’S REALLY NO WEIGHT DIFFERENCE IN WHERE WEIGHT IS FOR THIS SYSTEM?“I’m sure there’s more weight in the car. I don’t know how much more the system actually weighs, but I was talking about the sense of my experience when I sit in the car, when I’m driving the race car with the normal controls. It all feels just like the car that I currently race in IMSA. The pedal feels the same. The steering wheel feel is the same. There’s an emergency hydraulic brake that sits on the center tunnel there. That would be different. But again when I was doing my testing with the normal controls, there was nothing about that experience that I was driving that was something different about this car.” ON GETTING TO KNOW ROBERT WICKENS MORE.“For him to go through what he went through and with his drive and determination to get back in a race car again and be competitive and win races, that’s something that can be an inspiration for anybody. Anybody who’s gone through some sort of hardship like he has it’s what you make of your life and that situation. You can tell that it does change parts of his life. But the one thing that he doesn’t want it to change realistically is him driving race cars and driving them as fast as he does. To see that in person, that drive and determination and just never-give-up attitude that he has, it’s inspiring. I’m excited to race with him and see on a race weekend that part of him that I can tell that he has. To see that really come out, is going to be something exciting.” GOALS FOR THE LONG BEACH RACE.“I can probably answer for myself and for Robbie. I’ll bet you a win is going to be the goal, and I certainly think that’s possible. The Corvette has been fast in the past at Long Beach. His time in the car here at Sebring is going to be super important, and he knows the racetrack at Long Beach. He knows how to go sports car racing now, that’s for sure. It’ll certainly be a lot to take in. It’s a lot happening. It’s a short weekend. There’s not a lot of practice. From that side, you know all of the obstacles that are in the way of making that happen. Like I said, I have no doubt that he has the drive and determination to get the most out of himself fundamentally too. There’s still a bit of learning, of course. It’ll be new for him in some ways, first time in the race with this car. I also think the weekend goals-wise will be to help set himself up and the team up for a successful rest of the season as well. It’s not a checkers or wreckers kind of thing. It’s definitely going to be about getting the best result that we can, but I’m certainly not counting out a win.” ON FAMILIARITY WITH DXDT RACING AND INTEGRATION INTO IMSA.“I know this was a goal of David Askew’s for a long time. It’s a big accomplishment from his side and from the team side to be here in IMSA this year and prove to themselves and obviously everybody else in the paddock that they’re a team that belongs here, that can be successful and can win races. “From my side, on race weekends you do keep some touch with other teams and other drivers. I would say more so for me with DXDT than others just because of having driven for them a little bit last year. My sister is the team manager there, and I’m good friends with Bryan Sellers, as well. So there’s lots of reasons for me to kind of check in on them. My brother-in-law is crew chief, so there’s a lot of people there that I’m close with and want to see succeed. Based on Sebring, they put themselves in a great position to potentially win the race. The podium, I think, was really on the table for them. So there was some heartbreak to see that all kind of fall away in the last five minutes or so of the race. But I think ultimately that’s motivating for them to know that they’re doing all the right things and even more motivating to finally get that big first result for them when it comes.”