The Specialists

Being the complete GT driver isn’t just about being quick over a few laps. We asked some masters of the art what separates the great from the good.

I’d define an elite GT driver as someone who can manage their own race and perform at the highest level throughout, but all the while having one eye out the windshield and one in the rearview mirror,” says Corvette Racing’s Oliver Gavin as he contemplates the ingredients that separate the GT goods from the GT greats.

No question, the Brit is among a short list of great GT pilots, and while many of his rivals have achieved huge success, few have reached the hard-to-define status of the five-time Le Mans class winner. It’s not easy to pinpoint the many factors that differentiate the true GT aces from the rest but, like unicorns and UFOs, you’d definitely know one if you saw one.

While multi-tasking tops the list for Gavin, Andy Lally puts the ability to drive within a fraction of assured destruction without losing control as his defining factor.

“You need to be so close to the edge all the time, yet maintain total control,” says Lally, who earned his place in the GT elite with a record-setting Grand-Am career and currently drives the Magnus Racing Porsche 911 GT America in TUDOR Championship GTD. “The guys at the pointy end of the grid, week in and week out, make incredible car control while charging hard look like second nature. It’s an amazingly fine line: you have to drive at 99.9 percent to keep the tires alive for the stint, but still be right on the limit to not leave any grip on the table.”

Porsche factory driver Pat Long adds in mental capacity and control as another key differentiator for GT excellence.

“What defines most drivers you’d classify as elite status is the ability to drive at the limit, manage everything that’s going on around them, but still have enough bandwidth left over to record what’s going on with the car, so that they can communicate with the engineers and develop a plan to make the car even faster,” says the Californian ace, whose 2015 program includes a WEC campaign with Dempsey Racing-Proton.

“If you’re all-consumed by what’s happening on the track, you’re just fighting to survive,” he adds. “You see in the best GT drivers the ability to lead the session with the best lap, lead the team with the feedback that will make the car better, download what they just experienced to their teammates, and look relaxed while doing it. The best ones make it look easy, and that’s because – at least for them – it really is.”

There’s one more item agreed upon by these titans of GT racing, and that’s traffic management. With waves of prototypes carving mercilessly through the field, and Pro-Am drivers leaving fractions of time behind under braking and in the turns, you need to be in control as the chaos unfolds.

“Traffic is where you really earn your money,” Gavin (RIGHT) declares. “Imagine this: You’re coming into the Turn 2 hairpin at Laguna and you’ve got three GTD cars ahead all fighting over their positions. You’ve got a GTLM Porsche all over your backside, and then you’re aware there’s a couple of DP cars coming up quickly from behind. You know it’s going to come down to positioning your car at the right spot, at just the right time to get a good run off the corner, so you can speed past a couple of the GTD cars and put some space in between you and the Porsche.

“And, hopefully, the DP cars see how they are going to pick their way through without ruining your momentum and helping the Porsche go by. That’s an every-lap scenario we’re expected to handle without any mistakes, but all the top drivers are good at it. We know how to set these things up, read the situation consistently, and get ourselves a bit further up the road.”

Get the full version of this article in The GT Issue II of RACER, on sale now. Take a video tour of the issue below...