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CORVETTE RACING AT LONG BEACH: Mixed Qualifying Fortunes

Contact limits Wickens’ progress in GTD session; AWA’s Fidani quickest Bronze driver
LONG BEACH, Calif. (April 11, 2025) – DXDT Racing’s Robert Wickens and the No. 36 Corvette Z06 GT3.R will start from the fourth row in class following GT Daytona (GTD) qualifying Friday for the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship’s Grand Prix of Long Beach.
Wickens, driving the No. 36 Corvette equipped with Bosch’s new-generation electronic braking system alongside Tommy Milner, set a lap of 1:18.411 (90.354 mph) in the 15-minute session ahead of Saturday’s 100-minute race. That lap was 0.3 seconds slower than his fastest lap in qualifying, but that time was disallowed after the No. 36 brought out a red flag in practice earlier in the day.
Wickens’ Corvette also suffered contact from a slower car in qualifying that resulted in suspension damage that limited the performance of the Z06 GT3.R. It halted the positive momentum from the day’s final practice where Wickens and Milner had the fastest and third-fastest time in GTD, respectively.
Reigning Rolex 24 At Daytona GTD class winner AWA will start 11th in class Saturday after Orey Fidani’s qualifying run in the No. 13 Corvette. Fidani was the quickest Bronze-rated driver in the session at 1:19.387 (89.243 mph) – nearly seven-tenths of a second quicker than his qualifying lap from 2024.
He and Matt Bell finished sixth in class a year at Long Beach. It launched the team into a strong debut season with the Corvette program, which culminated in the Bob Akin Award for Fidani as the highest points-scoring Bronze driver in GTD. The award landed AWA an invitation to this year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans.
The Long Beach weekend is Wickens’ first race in a Corvette Z06 GT3.R and the first running alongside the rest of the GTD field. He and Milner combined for 74 laps and 145.63 miles of valuable data – alongside AWA’s 67 total laps – for Corvette Racing engineers to analyze for Saturday’s 100-minute race.
In addition to the IMSA race, two Corvette Z06 GT3.Rs will contest a pair of 40-minute sprint races in SRO Motorsports’ GT America series. Ross Chouest qualified ninth in the No. 50 Corvette for Chouest Povoledo Racing, and Blake McDonald was 11th in the No. 11 Corvette for DXDT Racing.
Chevrolet and the Corvette brand have been a fixture at Long Beach since the Corvette Racing program first visited Long Beach in 2007. In 17 visits, Corvette GT cars have captured eight victories with two additional in the Corvette Daytona Prototype era. Combined with results from the NTT INDYCAR SERIES, Chevrolet boasts a total of 22 victories in the Grand Prix’s two premier events.
The Grand Prix of Long Beach for the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship is scheduled for 2:05 p.m. PT on Saturday, April 12. The race will air live on USA Network starting at 5 p.m. ET with full streaming coverage on Peacock. IMSA Radio also will air the live call of the race at IMSA.com along with XM 206 and SiriusXM Online 996.
CORVETTE Z06 GT3.R POST-QUALIFYING DRIVER QUOTESROBERT WICKENS, NO. 36 CHEVROLET CORVETTE Z06 GT3.R – QUALIFIED EIGHTH IN GTD: “Not great. Obviously, I’m learning the series, the drivers to be around, the drivers not to be around. I don’t know. I was on my first push lap, there was a yellow Ferrari in front of me, he aborted his lap in the exit of Turn Nine and went full driver’s right before Turn 10. I took my racing line on my push lap and he just drove into the side of my car, bent the right rear suspension, then I had to do the whole qualy with a damaged car. It sucks. Obviously on the first push lap, you need to get a strong banker lap in with these qualys. You don’t know if there is going to be a red flag or a yellow or anything. The lap was going to be pretty strong and the car felt great, and then unfortunately after the damage the balance kind of wasn’t there. We put an okay time in, then it gets taken away from a mistake that I made in practice. It sucks. We deserve better. I feel bad for Tommy, for everyone at DXDT Racing. I wanted to have a good, smooth qualifying session. I was just baffled with what happened with that Ferrari and honestly, I wasn’t expecting it. I was fully convinced he was letting me pass because he was in the marbles on the right-hand side. And I guess, he wasn’t. He turned in and drove into my right rear.”
OREY FIDANI, NO. 13 CHEVROLET CORVETTE Z06 GT3.R – QUALIFIED 11TH IN GTD: “I’m very happy with qualifying. It just seems the more I get in this car, the better I seem to be doing, so I’m just going to build on the good results from today and push in the race and see where we get. So far everyone has been behaving pretty well with the traffic. This is a tough place to race at. It’s very narrow and when you are on cold tires you have to worry about the car stepping out and hitting the walls. So the plan is to take it easy the first couple of laps, get some heat in the tires and then send it!”