The Race Car In Your Garage

Subtitle:Racing Not Only Improves The Breed, But Sometimes The Breed Is Improved For Racing

The following is an excerpt from RACE TIME, a special issue of RACER presented by TUDOR:

One of the unique features of endurance sportscar racing as practiced in the TUDOR United Sports Car Championship is that the cars are real cars. That's not to say a Formula 1 car or IndyCar aren't real cars…but they share virtually nothing in common with the car parked in your garage or your neighbor's driveway, even if the nameplate is the same. Even "stock cars" as raced in NASCAR have nothing in common with the road cars they emulate.

In the TUDOR Championship, even the cars that don't look like anything one might see driving down the street, the prototypes, often share technology and engines with road cars. And, historically, they were often indeed prototypes of cars that might be produced, or at least test beds for future road car technology – and the prototypes are still prognostications of things to come.

"THE DIFFERENTIAL BETWEEN THE PRODUCTION CAR AND THE RACECAR HAS BEEN DRAMATICALLY NARROWED, NOT ONLY FROM A PERFORMANCE STANDPOINT, BUT FROM A DESIGN STANDPOINT AS WELL."

- Doug Fehan, Corvette Racing program manager

On the other hand, those 911s, Vipers, R8s, Corvettes, 458 Italias, Z4s and Vantages were all built from cars that came off a production line. In many cases, the racecars came off the production line ready to go into the hands of a race team, and not destined for a dealership.

The idea of buying a car that's nearly ready to hit the track – prepped for racing with no interior, full roll cage installed and most of the necessities for motorsports use ready to go – isn't a new one, but it's taken on greater momentum in recent years. Sure, many manufacturers have offered bodies-in-white ready to be turned into racecars, and in the heyday of muscle cars, turnkey drag racers weren't uncommon. But the factory output of road racing cars is a relatively recent idea, if you don't consider the 1940s and '50s, when cars were raced basically as produced.

"At a point where the sports car really was differentiated from the racecar, we decided to focus on the two products side by side," says Jens Walther, president and CEO of Porsche Motorsports North America. "In the old days, you would take your street car, modify it a little bit, or even just take off the side windows and go racing on the weekend. With more safety coming in time and more regulations for the street cars, that became not an option anymore. So you had to develop racecars.

"Racecar building is actually part of the R&D department in Weissach, so GT2, GT2RS, GT3, GT3RS…those cars are developed in the same department by the same people who develop the racecars," he continues. "We've found that this is our strength: to build racecars, to sell racecars and to support them."

Porsche is one of the first automakers to really produce racecars en masse. In fact, it produces so many of the GT3 Cup cars – around 300 this year since it's a new model for 2014 – that are used in one-make championships around the world, including the IMSA-sanctioned Porsche GT3 Cup USA, along with being eligible for competition in many national series, that it now produces them on the assembly line in Zuffenhausen alongside road-going 911s, Boxsters and Caymans. The company produces fewer of the other racing models, from a handful of RSRs as raced in GTLM to more GT Americas (GTD) and even more GT3 Rs (FIA GT3).

The numbers sold have made other manufacturers take notice. It's not just about selling cars and parts; just as important, it's about having the product seen on the racetrack. Selling customer cars creates the opportunity for that to happen without the automaker having to field a factory team.

"We sell SRT globally, and we know there are a lot of wonderful race fans throughout Europe," says Beth Paretta, marketing director for SRT Motorsports, which announced its factory racing program the same day it announced SRT was going to become a separate brand from Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep and now sells the Viper GT3R for customers. "Like any company that races, you want to talk about your capability, whether it be just your technical capability, durability or all the other things that come with racing. As OEMs, we're all lamenting the fact that cars are being seen more and more as appliances. Racing is one of the key ways to have emotion in cars.

"Why we want the GT3R out there is it's more Vipers on the racetrack, in different regions. And it's creating that excitement globally that hopefully will translate into sales for the Chrysler group. If we can get the GT3R into Europe, Asia, Australia…that helps. It's just getting our name out there in a more exciting way."

The advent of the FIA GT3 standard has made it more cost-effective for manufacturers. Not only is the GT3 ruleset used in the international championship, it also forms the basis for many national series as well. Thus, in addition to Porsche and SRT, Audi, Aston Martin, BMW, Ferrari, McLaren, Lotus, Bentley, Mercedes-Benz AMG – and soon to be joined by Chevrolet, Lexus and Jaguar – all produce, or partner with other companies to build, GT3-legal racecars.

Audi has produced more than 130 R8 LMS cars and the car is raced in GTD by four different teams. Like Porsche and SRT, there is a factory-supported component to the brand's racing activities; in Audi's case, the R18 LMP1 prototype that competes in the World Endurance Championship and at Le Mans. While the R18 is an incredible machine and tells a very important story for Audi, notes Romolo Liebchen, head of Audi Sport Customer Racing, the R8 LMS carries a different message.

"One is the message coming from the top with the R18, from the Le Mans project with the highest technology. That's one thing the company can do. The other thing is to show what road car products can do, and that's' the R8 LMS, the R8 customer racecar. This car is so close to the car the customer can buy – more than 50 percent of the road car components are integrated into the racecar – and it is also very successful. These two messages together, I think, is a very good story," he says.

Liebchen notes that later this year, the R8 LMS will have participated in 1000 races worldwide since its introduction. That's a lot of exposure to potential customers. And while marketing is a key component of any factory-involved racing program, the lessons learned from pushing products to their limits is equally as important.

Chevrolet doesn't sell customer race-ready cars – although it is working with Callaway cars to produce and sell a GT3-spec Corvette – but its factory race program in the TUDOR Championship and at Le Mans is paying big dividends for Corvette road car buyers.

"The differential between the production car and the racecar has been dramatically narrowed, not only from a performance standpoint, but from a design standpoint as well," explains Doug Fehan, Corvette Racing program manager. "Whether it's aerodynamics, whether it's engine powerplant, whether it's handling…all those things have improved on the road car, based on the racecar."

It works both ways – road cars are tweaked to make them better for racing, and the lessons applied from racing are then worked into the road car. It's been a leapfrog motion for Corvette since it started with the C5-R GT1 program in 1999. The disappearance of pop-up headlights in favor of more aerodynamic flush headlights on the c6 is one example of changing road car design to improve the racecar; another is a single large grill opening, also a request from the racing arm.The c7 Covette is the frist complete redesign of the Corvette since the racing program began, and it's largely a product of racetrack teachings.

"A racecar is always trying to achieve a 50-50 weight balance. Well, we've achieved that now in the production car," says Fehan. "Those things in the old days that never really got looked at…you put this here, you put that there, and whatever it turned out to be, well…that's good. Not anymore. The designers are looking at how a great racecar operates and trying to find a way to implement those into the production vehicles."

Porsche's race and production engineers work together from the beginning, because with every version of the road 911, there was a racing version. "We learned that right from the first sketches of the car, the street car division and the racecar division worked together to make sure that the racecar doesn't suffer later on from any changes you have to make. Since we develop them in parallel, we solve questions as they come along and not later. So some components on the racecar are in the place they are for racing," says Walther. Porsche's penchant for putting the key/starter button on the left of the steering wheel? That originated from the famous Le Mans start where drivers had to run to their cars and jump in; having the key on the left made the process that much quicker.

Although it's far less obvious to the end consumer, lessons are being learned in the prototype category as well. Many of the engines are derived from production units, including the 3.5-liter, twin-turbo Ford Ecoboost mill that powered the No. 01 TelCel Riley driven by Scott Pruett, Memo Rojas and Marino Franchitti to victory in the 12 Hours of Sebring for Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates.

"We're taking a production engine that's designed to make 365hp in a Taurus SHO application and making more than 600hp with it," says Ford Racing Engineer David Simon. "It really is a great test bed to push the durability limits, to push the design limits of all the components to create a data point for our production engineers to use."

More than half the components of the Ecoboost production engine are used in the race version. Mazda is taking a similar approach, trying to not only prove power and durability, but efficiency as well with its diesel-powered SKYACTIV-D prototypes run by SpeedSource Race Engineering. The engine in those cars is derived from the production Mazda6 Diesel that will arrive in the U.S. later this year.

"There's a SKYACTIV story in all of this," explains John Doonan, director, Mazda Motorsports, referring to the series of efficiency technologies Mazda is employing in its road cars, "and that's Mazda's philosophy of taking what we have right now, the internal-combustion engine – not electric, not hybrid – and trying to maximize, just like you do in a racecar, lighter weight technologies, more efficient technologies. Then there's the ongoing Mazda brand story which is we are not afraid to take some risks, to do things a little bit differently."

Ford and Mazda will take the lessons learned by racing their engines, just as Porsche, Audi, SRT, BMW, Aston Martin, Chevrolet and Ferrari do with their GT cars, and apply them to the next generation. It's an ongoing process that continues to improve road cars, not only by incorporating technology from racing, but also by building road cars to be good racecars from the beginning.