EcoBoosts Ready for Every Challenge the Rolex 24 At Daytona Brings

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 “Sure racing’s a gamble,” driver Scott Pruett once said, “But maybe not in the way you might think.”

Principal driver of the Chip Ganassi with Felix Sabates No. 01 Ford EcoBoost prototype since the team’s 2014 start in prototype racing, Pruett would go on to note other factors that make a gamble of an endurance race such as this weekend’s Rolex 24 At Daytona, practice and qualifying for which begins Thursday at Daytona International Speedway.

“First and probably associated with the biggest risk, are the four classes of cars that’ll be competing on the same track at the same time,” Pruett said. “As a prototype, our Ford EcoBoost race car is at the top of the food chain, so to speak, because it has top-speed capability and can corner among the very best. So we (the team’s four drivers) must be extremely careful when we overtake slower cars, wherever we may be on the race course. Almost every year someone rear-ends someone else. It’s a great way to end a race for two cars, one of them being entirely innocent.”

Pruett would go on to note that sleep management, especially challenging for first-time competitors, is another human factor that looms large when in an endurance race.

“Especially a 24-hour race like Daytona,” Pruett said. “And that can happen on even our own team. First-year guys have a really hard time sleeping and, then have to stay alert in a car when concentration, lap after lap after lap, is super-critical.”

The stakes remain high at race tracks throughout North America when Ford Performance and Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates combine camps in the paddocks of sanctioning-body IMSA’s TUDOR United SportsCar Series, which this weekend will start its season with the series’ biggest race, The Rolex 24 At Daytona.

Ford engineers are usually crawling throughout garages and paddocks, learning not just how a car can be made better, but make better every part within that car. Improvements learned from racing components are fed into the company’s street cars, not just to make them quicker in straight lines or more capable in cornering, but also in longevity and developing new technologies like Ford EcoBoost engines.

Last year, straight-off-the-assembly-line Ford parts made up nearly 70 percent of the Ganassi/Ford TUDOR USCC Prototype and similar numbers should again prove to be the case for 2015.

In this weekend’s Rolex 24 At Daytona, the two Chip Ganassi with Felix Sabates cars — No. 01 piloted by Pruett, Joey Hand, Charlie Kimball, and Sage Karam; and No. 02 driven by Scott Dixon, Tony Kanaan, Kyle Larson, and Jamie McMurray — will together accumulate between 5,000 and 6,000 miles in competition. Add to those numbers still more miles — at 3.56 miles per lap — coming from practice and qualifying laps.

It’s a massive effort, with nearly 40 individual team members from Ganassi Racing and a like number of Ford Company, Ford Performance, and Roush Yates Engines’ management, engineers, production staff and others also on hand.

“I love racing,” said senior Ganassi/Ford Racing driver Scott Pruett.  “After getting out of Karting and wondering where I’d go next, Ford, with Jack Roush, who at that time was into IMSA racing, in 1985 took a gamble with me — and we won. And we won. And we won some more. It was a huge gamble that paid off for everyone involved, I think.”

 

(Team Ford Performance)

Adam Sinclair
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