With practice and qualifying over for 2009 the Corvette team now settles down to a day of preparing for the greatest endurance race in the world. The lessons learned the last 2 days have given the core of engineers a lot to digest and they spent the day calculating various scenarios developing the best strategy for the tomorrow’s start to the 77th running of the 24-Heures du Mans. The 63-car tried new gear ratios for Thursday practice/qualifying and the experiment paid off with the car circulating La Sarthe a little better than it did with the previous set-up. So both of the cars pulled their transaxles today and replaced them with specially prepared race gearboxes employing the newly tried and proven gear ratio set-up. The crews also pulled the recently installed engines and replaced them with fresh engines also prepared for the Le Mans race. The C8R engine supplier Katech has produced 4, 2 for each car, totally new engines for this race using brand new engine block castings, etc. Practice early Saturday morning will prove if the new engine/transaxle swaps are ready for the challenge of the race. Should any issues arise there will be time to exchange them before the 4pm start of the race.
A Le Mans tradition has developed featuring Mike West the crew chief for the 64-car. Westy has become famous for his adlib Jimmy Hendrixesk rock guitar rendition of the American Star Spangled Banner. Usually Mike packs his own guitar but cost savings for this year’s trip dictated sending less freight over to France and Mike’s guitar was left home - so someone arranged for Mike to have a rental from a nearby town. The strings were a bit rusty but West made them sing. A huge crowd formed around the Corvette Racing pit spaces while Mike split the air with his guitar licks. It was really cool to see pit lane fill with admiring fans and cheer Mike on.
Rockstar session over the team resumed their day of preparation interrupted only by the Le Mans tech inspectors dropping in to test transponder equipment on each of the cars. With no late night track time scheduled the day came to an early close (8pm) so everyone could head back to the hotel and start racking-up some rest.
The official fan Friday program for the Le Mans Race is the “Parade des Pilotes.” The full field of drivers are loaded into historic open cars of all ages and paraded around the town of Le Mans. It is a pretty big deal and the international gathering of fans love it. Of course it offers a chance to party and the thousands of racing faithful take advantage of every opportunity.
Race day starts Saturday at 6am and the Corvette entourage will not get back to their hotel rooms until after 10pm on Sunday night – for Corvette Racing the 24-Hours of Le Mans will be a 40-hour day.
See us on facebook
See us on LinkedIn
