WEC: Q&A with GM sports car racing program manager

GM sports car racing program manager Laura Wontrop Klauser and other OEM principals participated today in a media Q&A via Zoom hosted by the FIA World Endurance Championship ahead of Cadillac Racing’s Hypercar debut in the season-opening 1000 Miles of Sebring on March 17.

What were the main takeaways from Daytona and how is your preparation progressing for Sebring?

“Daytona was nice to have sort of a 24-hour dress rehearsal for Le Mans within in a race in itself, and we were hoping to have gone away with the trophy. I’d say the main takeaways were we are very pleased with our vehicles, we think we have a strong package but we need to find some more pace. There is a lot of development between now and the Sebring race kicking off the WEC season, continuing to fine-tune the vehicle, understand what it’s good at, what we need to do to get better, working through all of the details. The good news is we have 24 hours of data to do that, but there is not that much time to take the data and work with it.”

Talk about your experience with a pretty good BoP in GTP in IMSA and your level of confidence that will continue with a rather wider task.

“There has been a lot of thought put into how to set all this up for success. In terms of how the regulations are written for the LMDh platform and even what we share with LMH in terms of different targets like mass and power targets, there has been a lot of preparation put into making sure the cars by design – if you follow the regulations, which we all have to – are very close to each other right out of the box. I think that’s what we saw in IMSA at Daytona where we took the baseline settings for the vehicles and we all were able to race together. I think we saw some great racing during the race. Applying that as we move into WEC, where you have both platforms together – LMDh and LMH – it’s using those same concepts of making sure the baseline is very close so that you don’t have to worry about cars being wildly different and how they create performance and being able to compete together. There’s also some differences between the platforms that there has been a committee that has worked through issues, which has representation from all the manufacturers involved in the programs, so that we’ve been able to identify anything we felt would make a big difference between the two platforms for the regulations and work through that. I’d say that everyone has put as much possible effort as they could in to getting this right and I’m excited to see what happens at Sebring. I’m looking forward to seeing all of us on track together and then working with the ACO as we move forward into the season and, of course, IMSA as well on its side and the collaboration between the two series.”

Do you have to re-homologate the car for the WEC?

“It’s one homologation. Our car is homologated. There are differences in scrutineering systems for IMSA and the WEC, so we will have some different electronics depending on where we’re racing to make sure that we’re legal and simple things like where the Michelin sticker goes on the car depending on which series you’re in. For the most part, they are the same cars and that is what appealed most to us about this opportunity to be a part of this platform. One car can race both series, which means you can race all over the world in two series.”

How much did the Rolex 24 help you in preparing for the WEC?

“Daytona, as a track, is very different from Sebring and then the other circuits that we’ll be going to the rest of the WEC season. While any time you turn the car on you learn there are still things you continue to learn, especially as we race at Sebring. Many of us have tested there but it will be nice to do the proper racing as well and see what we still need to know about the car. Sebring is one of the best places in the world to find out how reliable your vehicle is, so it will be exciting to see what things look like at the end of the races.”

Cadillac hasn’t tested in Europe ahead of the WEC. Will that be a disadvantage and why did you make that decision?

“We would have liked to do some testing in Europe. The main reason we didn’t is we were very hardware constrained and shipping has become quite challenging in terms of lead time, so we could not sacrifice the car being in a container being shipped for extra days or weeks when we had a very aggressive test schedule that we were trying to accomplish in a short period of time. Now that we have gone racing, we’re going to see if we can get some testing scheduled in Europe in the spring. It’s always good to test on pavement that is similar to where you’re racing, so that would be key on our list of something to get done. If we cannot, we’ll do our best to work around it because that’s what we do in racing – we adapt to our situation. We’re trying to find elements of tracks in the U.S. similar to what you see in Europe or different things we can understand on the car so that when we get to Europe we’re ready to go.”

Do you see that as a handicap going forward?

“In a perfect world we would have had some European testing. As complicated as these cars are and as complex as this puzzle that we’re all trying to figure out, I don’t think it is something that is going to completely put us out of the running. It’s just one item that we wish we would have gotten to and we’ll just have to work around.”

Do you think the BoP now is transparent and there isn’t a game to play?

“This is by far the most regulated and transparent situation we’ve ever been in since I’ve been involved. We’re at a point where I think most of us are focused on making sure the hardware and al the integration of the hybrid systems is working properly and the performance part, because of how tight the regulations are, is something that we know where the car needs to be and then we’re making sure all the parts of the car support us being where we need to be.”