Well, I'll never have an excuse for being late to an appointment: I have a Rolex now! I am a very proud winner of the GT class in the Rolex 24 At Daytona.
Sylvain Tremblay, Nick Ham, David Haskell and myself took our SpeedSource Mazda RX-8 past the checker four laps ahead of our nearest rival. Thank you to Castrol Syntec, Mazda, all racers running Mazdas, and thanks to all who have supported me over the years. SpeedSource is an amazing team and I couldn't be happier and more thankful to running my rookie season in sports car racing with them. 2010 has gotten off to a great start and, of course, now we are leading the Rolex GT Series championship.
It's an interesting challenge – mentally, physically and emotionally – to complete a 24-hour race, especially when you're in a potential race-winning car. But the team made it as easy as they could for us. We'd done a lot of testing beforehand, so we were familiar enough with the car. Sylvain probably had the majority because he was going to qualify it and start the race, but I'd say Dave, Nick and myself had had around 25-28 laps each. And that wasn't just lapping the track: we'd practiced driver changes, refueling, tire stops and so on, and we'd adjusted the balance to suit us all.
Some might think that finding a compromise setup so it suits four different driving styles might be a problem, but it actually seemed pretty seamless. We weren't complaining about anything major, but anything we did adjust – like looseness on power-down at corner exits – we all shared the same opinion. We word it slightly different from driver to driver, but it wasn't like one guy was saying the car was loose off the corner and another one was complaining about chronic mid-corner understeer! When we improved the car, it improved for all of us.
The way it worked out, the shift orders went Sylvain-Nick-David-me, and we each pretty much double-stinted our opening runs. One stint works out as about an hour, which equated to around 30-31 laps; that's how long a tank of gas lasts at racing speeds. However, a lot of the single stints can turn into stints-and-a-half because of full-course cautions. So, it was a long night. Actually, the 3:30 p.m. start time makes it a little bit rough on the guy that's fourth in the lineup: I was there throughout Saturday, but the first time I got in the car was about 8 p.m. It's like the endurance part of the race starts way before the driving! But who's complaining? The flip side of the deal is that I was in for the final stint on Sunday, so I was the man who drove past the checkers. Very cool.
In qualifying we were third fastest, but Sylvain was running alone so he couldn't get a draft. Gotta say, it was a very impressive lap in those circumstances. Our race pace was equally impressive but some of our rivals did pick up the pace. Everyone seemed to be pushing very hard for as long as they could. Fortunately for us, the No. 70 Mazda RX-8 was just as fast at the end of a race as it was at the beginning.
I think Grand-Am has done a good job of equalizing the performance between cars: They are dealing with different weights, horsepower, torque, tire sizes and aerodynamics, but amazingly enough all the cars are very competitive with one another. It makes for some very exciting racing because some cars are better on certain parts of the track than others, but ultimately doing the same lap time. That's all new to me, coming from formula cars that are as identical as it gets.
The rotary engines in the RX-8s can do anywhere between 75 and 100 hours – they're just amazing – so from that standpoint, we were completely confident in driving hard. The game plan was to go as fast as you can within your means. In other words, be as fast as you can while being perfect and not taking risks. So don't pound curbs, don't drop wheels off onto the dirt, don't over-rev. If you can do that while turning 1min50sec laps, great. If you can only do it while producing 1m52sec, that's fine, too.
Obviously, the Daytona Prototypes are going about eight or nine seconds a lap faster than that, so while they're keeping their concentration as they're lapping us, believe me, we're having to concentrate just as hard to judge everything just right when they're coming past! I would far rather be the car passing than getting passed because you have so much more control of the situation. There were 28 cars in the GT field, but 14 cars in DPs, so the mental focus in watching your mirrors while still trying to race who you're supposed to be racing in GT is quite a challenge. You're trying to get the DP to pass at the best time for you so you can try to control the risk, but you have to remember they're in a race, too, so you don't want to hold them up for too long. It's an overwhelming amount of information you're soaking up every lap.
Journalists sometimes ask new GT drivers if it's frustrating to have to let prototypes past when you're getting your teeth into hunting down one of your own rivals. My answer is yes…but you have to remind yourself that later on that lap, or the next, that DP is going to be doing the same to the guy you're chasing, so you can get that time back. However, I've got to admit, it takes some mental discipline to not start over-driving if you've lost time because a DP's stolen your line on a corner. As a team, we constantly told ourselves that if we spin, or have a minor excursion or get muscled out the way by a DP, accept that lap time has gone, and you're not going to be able to get it back. That's tough to accept but if you don't follow that mindset and try to recover the time, you're going to be taking way too much risk.
In actuality, there were some close calls for us but nothing that led to contact or going off the track. From that point of view, the race was as straightforward as you can expect when 42 cars set off to go racing for 24 hours.
Like I say, my first stint started at about 8 p.m., when it's dark, but floodlighting is pretty good around Daytona. There are some dark spots where it's hard to see the edge of the track, but it's never like driving with just your headlights. I'd say the only difficult part of the night stints is figuring the closing rate of the cars behind you. You can't see who it is – all you see is lights – and you're not sure if they're particularly bright and quite a way back, or not so good but real close behind. So if it's a prototype, it's hard to guess when you're going to get passed by it.
Then, toward the end of the race, there's a new challenge. The track is actually still fast but only on the racing line. What's getting harder and harder as the race goes on is running off line. By the end of 24 hours, there's a ton of rubber marbles around, so letting a DP car through, or trying to pass a GT car gets more difficult because it leads you onto treacherous bits of track.
What I didn't have to deal with was a wet track. The first three hours were wet, and Sylvain double-stinted, and then for about half of Nick's double stint, it was wet, too. By the time I got in, it was dry but it wouldn't have bothered me either way. In our pre-race meeting, after seeing the radar and realizing the rain would only last a few hours, we just said: “OK, we have an amazing car, we know exactly what it is in the dry, so let's just get through the wet period safely, no heroics, and then go after them.”
My hat's off to the team and the drivers: we had a good plan that seemed to take account of everything. Fortunately for me, SpeedSource has won this race before, and we have some amazing people like Bill Riley to help with the strategy. We never had a penalty in pit stops; every maneuver in there went smooth at every changeover, so everybody stuck to the plan. Basically, we knew that if we kept the car on the asphalt, we'd be contenders at the end, and that is a very reassuring feeling to have.
You need that reassurance when you're sharing a car. Sitting on the sidelines – man, it's hard not to get nervous! But we trust each other to go fast without overstepping the mark so we can go back to the motor home to relax and sleep when someone else is driving. I just had faith that, no matter what, that car would still be in one piece when it was time for me to walk back to the pit lane and start my next stint. That, too, is very comforting.
Having said that, it didn't help with my sleep. Apart from one hour of shut-eye after my first stint, I found it near impossible to rest. I had my iPhone with the live timing, and a radio, too, and then there's the noise of the cars going around the track…It's really hard to switch off from all that and just sleep.
But now, I guess sleep is overrated: We won! The keys to victory were that we were on the pace, we spent less time in the pits than anyone else, we incurred no penalties, we had a good strategy, and the one or two hiccups that caused us to lose a few laps early on (we had a vibration that needed investigating) were remedied as fast as humanly possible. We stayed really focused and just started getting those laps back.
I'm very happy to say that the SpeedSource Mazda RX-8 will be my home for the rest of the year: I'm giving 110 percent of myself for the team, for Mazda and for Castrol Syntec. Being able to say I drive in the “factory” Mazda RX-8 is an unbelievable feeling for me. The GT championship is the goal for Sylvain and I; for Mazda, the manufacturers' championship is a huge deal, and I have no doubt that we'll be extremely competitive. The track schedule is similar to last year, there haven't been a lot of rule changes and the new car is improved, so our chances of winning more races and going for the title are as good as anyone's in the paddock.
I don't think we get another Rolex if we win the title, but myself, SpeedSource, Sylvain and Mazda will just concentrate on the results for now…
JB