IMSA: AXR's Twos and Fives

Action Express Racing’s driver lineup was working well in the early stages of the 2013 season, but the numbers said the situation could be improved. Brian Frisselle and Christian Fittipaldi drove the No. 5 AXR Corvette DP as hard as they could, Burt Frisselle and Joao Barbosa pushed AXR’s the No. 9 Corvette DP to its limits, yet after three winless rounds, team manager Gary Nelson and engineer Iain Watt saw something hidden in the minutia that revealed a mismatch in driver chemistry.

AXR’s four drivers weren’t complaining, and the hundreds of data channels on both cars weren’t triggering any alarms, so what led to Fittipaldi being moved to the No. 9 with Barbosa and the Frisselle brothers being reunited in the No. 5?

“In our driver debriefs, we would have our drivers come together and describe how their cars were handling for them, and as many teams do, we ask them to rate things,” Nelson explains. “They’ll say the car’s understeer was a 2, which isn’t bad, and maybe on the other car, they’ll say their understeer was a 5 – pretty severe.  

“After we started comparing those notes, we got into the season and realized Christian and Joao and Brian and Burt were always asking for more of the other. We looked and there was definitely a trend. If Brian thought the understeer was a 5, Christian said it felt like a 2 to him. And on the other car, Joao was calling it a 2 and Burt felt it was a 5. And the same differences were there with oversteer, for example.”

AXR’s wise recognition and swift response to shuffle its lineup – pairing the 2s and 5s together – set things in motion for 2014 where Barbosa and Fittipaldi (left and right, TOP) went on to earn the Prototype championship.

“Christian and Joao communicated in similar ways technically, and that gave us faster cars when we put them together and the Frisselles together,” Nelson continued. “Before, many times the engineer would say, ‘I don’t know if I’m fixing oversteer or understeer because one driver wants more of one and one driver wants more of the other!"

If Watt has one regret, it’s the three races in 2013 where Barbosa and Fittipaldi were separated.“We didn’t miss out on the [Drivers’] championship by much,” he said. “I can only imagine what would have happened if we’d had Christian and Joao scoring points together all season, but we gave everybody a three-race handicap.

“If I’m honest, if they were in the same car all year, I think we’d be celebrating our second consecutive championship as we speak…”​

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