Fehan Still on Cloud 9 After Corvette Racing 1-2 Rolex 24 Finish

Subtitle:Race Program Leader Loved Letting His Drivers Battle

Doug Fehan has led the Chevrolet’s Corvette Racing program since its inception in 1999, and you’d think he’s seen everything. After all, in 2015, a Corvette scored a GT Le Mans (GTLM) class win in the Rolex 24 At Daytona, the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring, and the GTE Pro class win in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

So he was probably prepared for the Corvette C7.R one-two finish in the 2016 Rolex 24 at Daytona, right?

Wrong. “It was an epic battle,” Fehan said. “Truly, it doesn’t get any better than that. It’s what everyone on this team is racing for.”

“Epic” is not an overstatement. In a race where most every GTLM car took its turn at the head of the pack, the two bright-yellow Corvette C7.Rs, the No. 4 of Oliver Gavin and the No. 3 of Antonio Garcia, both veteran Corvette drivers, battled for the win right down to the checkered flag.

In the end, Gavin edged by Garcia with a 0.034-second margin of victory, the closest class finish in the history of the Rolex 24.

It would have been easier, and perhaps more sensible given the fact that there is not only a race but an IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship to win, to issue “team orders” – tell the two drivers to assume a careful one-two posture on the final laps to prevent them from taking each other out. And there have been times, Fehan says, when that has happened.

But not last Sunday. Fehan let the drivers know that there were no team orders, to battle it out on the track but to please, please, be careful. It was a decision Fehan made only after consulting with his bosses, and to their credit, he said, they wanted to see a full-fledged, race-to-the-finish ending themselves.

“We’ve had situations when it was smart to control the outcome,” Fehan explained. “But in this particular instance, for as hard as everyone worked, it was simply the right thing to do. This is a sporting event, a competition, a race, that’s why every individual on the team is there, to try and come away victorious. It was not a difficult decision for me, and I was very fortunate that my upper management, to whom I went, had enough confidence and faith in us to let us race for it.

“And it turned out OK.”

After the race, Gavin said, “All I could think about was my boss, Doug Fehan, and what he would say if we did touch!”

Fehan said that the parity in the GT Le Mans class has never been better judging from the race and from the lap times among the manufacturers, all of which logged fast laps in the one minute, 44-second bracket. He said he doesn’t expect to see major “Balance of Performance” alterations between now and the next race, the Twelve Hours of Sebring in March. BoP, as it is called, is when the IMSA rulesmakers add or subtract performance from cars to ensure a level playing field.

And as for the troubled debut of the Ford GT team?

“They’ll be fine,” Fehan said. “They had the pace. You can test all you want, but things happen under race conditions that you can’t anticipate. It happened to them, and it has happened to us.”