Less than two months after a catastrophic transporter fire threatened to derail their entire season, DXDT Racing has pulled off the near-impossible. The team’s #36 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R is back on the grid for this weekend’s Sahlen’s Six Hours of The Glen.
For program manager Bryan Sellers, the road to recovery was a logistical nightmare so severe that starting completely over would have been a welcome alternative.
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“It’s been bumpy. It’s been tough. There’s not really a road map from where we came from,” Sellers told Motorsport.com. “We’re literally running every single thing in our shop through insurance and adjusters and trying to figure out if things are salvageable or if we should write them off… It would have been easier to build the program from the ground up again than to have to rebuild it this way.”
The disaster struck en route to WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, resulting in a near-total loss of the team’s primary assets. The fire was so intense that the team’s primary Corvette chassis literally melted into the structure of the transporter and eventually had to be craned out. Along with the car, virtually all of the team’s tools, pit equipment, and engineering infrastructure were destroyed.
Unlike massive NASCAR organizations, several sports car programs don’t operate with an abundance of spare haulers and duplicate machinery. Yet, despite the scale of the destruction, team owner David Askew never hesitated about the future of the program.
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What it took to make it onto the Watkins Glen grid
#36 DXDT Racing Corvette Z06 GT3.R: Mason Filippi, Salih Yoluc, Charlie Eastwood
#36 DXDT Racing Corvette Z06 GT3.R: Mason Filippi, Salih Yoluc, Charlie Eastwood
According to Sellers, Askew’s immediate reaction was simple: “All right, how are we going to bounce back?”
To make the grid at Watkins Glen, the DXDT crew had to execute a massive, month-long thrash. The team took a Corvette chassis previously used in SRO America competition and began the arduous process of converting it to strict specifications to race in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
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Because IMSA rules require distinct electronics – such as specialized torque sensors, and scrutineering harnesses – the SRO car couldn’t just be rolled out. It had to be stripped completely down to the bare tub and entirely re-engineered.
“With the time frame we have, you don’t build a program in four weeks, right? And we had to rebuild a program in four weeks,” Sellers said. “The last two weeks, I think they worked 7am to 10pm every single night just to get it turned around to be here in time.”
Beyond the car itself, the fire claimed another irreplaceable asset: the highly specialized, custom-adapted hand controls utilized by driver Robert Wickens.
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Facing a hard deadline for Wickens’ expected return to the cockpit at next month’s Chevrolet Grand Prix at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park (CTMP), Bosch managed to manufacture and deliver a replacement set in just four weeks.
“We’re good,” Sellers said. “We have everything we need. We turn the car around the Monday after this race, Monday and Tuesday after this race, to actually go to Canadian Tire Motorsport Park to do a shakedown test and then prepare for the next week.
“It was a massive undertaking. Something like six to eight months in the first iteration of the hand control, and now they were able to turn around a second set in about four weeks. You can imagine how many people it took to get that done, but we are okay and we’ll be good for him when he comes back.”
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This weekend, the IMSA Michelin Endurance Cup pairing of Salih Yoluc and Corvette factory driver Charlie Eastwood will join full-season pilot Mason Filippi behind the wheel of the resurrected GTD class entry.
While simply showing up to Watkins Glen is a triumph of human effort, DXDT is refusing to treat this weekend as a mere feel-good story. The team already tasted success earlier this season when Wickens secured a GTD class pole at Long Beach, and Sellers insisted their performance benchmarks remain completely unaltered.
“Our goal doesn’t change because of what happened,” Sellers stated firmly. “We came to win and came to win only. I think to adjust that goal on our guys right now would be doing a disservice to all the work that they’ve currently put in, because they didn’t put in that work just to all of a sudden come and accept a podium.
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“There’s a standard that we want to try and hold ourselves to, and that’s it.”
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