| TOMMY MILNER, NO. 4 CHEVROLET CORVETTE Z06 GT3.ROn the outlook for Petit Le Mans and entering the final race of the season leading the GTD PRO championships.“Certainly it’s great to be in the points lead going into the last race. That’s where you’d prefer to be, of course. But everything is still very close. Ultimately we need to have a very strong race, no matter what. There’s still many, many cars mathematically in the hunt for the championship, and so all of those teams will certainly be doing everything that they can to get that win. For us, it’s as we’ve approached all the other races this year. Obviously we need to score good points, no matter what. I know there’s lots of points possibilities and things like that we won’t bother ourselves with at this point. That won’t matter until the race gets going. But yeah, we’ve had a good year so far. Some ups and some downs, but obviously great to be P1 going into the last race. And then great to have Nico back as well. He’s a super, super talented young kid who’s been very fast this year. So yeah, for us, it’s going to be a little business as usual in many ways, and focusing on ourselves, making sure that we have the best Corvette that we can for the race and see what happens at the end.”Describe how crazy this race gets in the final hour with the traffic, the track being dark and everything you face at the end.“We’ve seen for many, many years now that the racing is very exciting at the end of Petit. Atlanta is a very dark racetrack, so there’s a lot of sections where there’s really no track lighting and with all the elevation change and things like that, you have lots of areas where you are driving at many times what it feels like blind and just kind of going off of muscle memory. The track itself is difficult, and then obviously you throw in a big sports car race at the end of the year, the last race of a championship, and everybody is driving absolutely at the limit of themselves and the car’s capabilities. Being in a GT car and Road Atlanta being as difficult as it is, just by yourself but when you add the traffic into the equation, the racing is very tricky in many situations. These days in IMSA, in all classes the competitiveness is so high and all the cars end up being very close on the racetrack… for us in a GT car, usually it’s not just one prototype car coming by; it’s two or three. Sometimes it’s one LMP2 and two GTPs, and so the closing speeds are different. You rely as much as you can on your spotters and all the information that you have from your team about what’s coming, but ultimately it’s our responsibility in the car to make the right decisions in places… when to kind of let those guys go by, especially in the Esses, making sure that we don’t put ourselves in a bad position. So there’s a lot that goes into it at the end of the race with the traffic, with the championships on the line, people wanting to win that race, obviously. All those things coming together make the race quite exciting, typically. I would say some tracks we go to are more mentally draining than others. Road Atlanta is definitely a combination of both mental and physical exhaustion at the end of the race.” |
