Acura's Eversley sees racing from two sides

In the days when most pro drivers came up through the ranks of club racing, running their own car as crew chief/mechanic/parts washer, most had a pretty good understanding of the inner workings of their machinery, even after they moved on to a situation where others were handling that side of the racing equation for them. There are still a few pros who have been on the other side, working as a mechanic or other crew before they moved on to the starring role. Ryan Eversley, driver of the No. 43 RealTime Racing Acura NSX in Pirelli World Challenge GT, is one of those.

There's a theory that drivers who have been on the other side have a deeper understanding of the machine, know how to get the most out of it, and keep things together longer over the course of a race. Eversley will tell you that in the modern day of GT racing, that no longer applies.

"The NSX has so many assist systems like paddle shifting and auto-blip downshifts and stuff like that that stops you from hurting the car," he explains. "I'd say in the slower classes, where you're driving touring cars or sedans, sure. But in these current cars, everything is so foolproof to stop that exact kind of thing from happening. It takes any advantage like that away."

As Eversley notes, it's a different story when you have to do the shifting yourself and there aren't a lot of electronics to keep a driver from making a mistake.

"One of the big things about racing the Honda Civic the previous couple of years before I switched over to the the Acura program, is we had a definite brake deficit compared to some of the MX-5s and BMWs, so understanding how the brake system works and how heat can destroy not only the brake but the tire, I think that helped me save my equipment.

The Civic in the IMSA Continental Tire SportsCar Challenge was one tier in Eversley's experience. On the mechanical side, it began a few years prior, at Mike Johnson's Archangel Motorsports LMP675 team in ALMS. He went on to do some Grand-Am and IMSA racing, and even won a couple of World Challenge Touring Car races at Mid-Ohio in 2010. But as a mechanic, one of the first drivers he worked with left an impression on him.

"When I first started as a mechanic in 2001, Andy Lally was our driver and he was always the first guy to help us break down cardboard boxes after the new parts showed up or go get pizzas or clean a body panel. So I still try to do that to this day when my guys are swamped," Eversley says.

Despite the mechanical empathy – the ability to care for the car the way only one who knows the inner workings can – not being a big part of race driving anymore, Eversley says there are still some things from his past that make him if not a better driver, a better team member.

"I understand from being a mechanic on a race team, if you have an off, you need to be completely upfront about it and tell them exactly what happened. Never try to lie because it can affect you later. When you're a mechanic, you get told by a driver, "I had a small off," and the car comes in on the tow hook in two pieces. Or, "I've got a water leak." Well, it's because you ripped the front of the car off and the radiator is sitting in the grass in Turn 3. So I try to be as honest with these guys as I can be, and if I can lend a hand scrubbing bodywork or helping push the car on the trailer, I'm happy to do so," he says.

As the season moves on, scrubbing bodywork is the sort of routine thing that hopefully has to be done to Eversley's NSX, which he shares with Tom Dyer (pictured, right, with Eversley, middle, and HPD's Art St. Cyr) in the SprintX races. The NSX GT3 is new this year, replacing the TLX GT built to the old World Challenge GT rules that RealTime raced previously and won three races with. The NSX was well developed in private and public testing in 2016, but the racing environment isn't always the same. The team and the drivers, however, are getting a handle on the car and making progress up the timing sheets.

"The thing about our car is it doesn't have a predecessor like almost every car we're racing against," he explains. "We were able to learn a lot of things with the TLX, but it's a different motor, a different gearbox – two different cars completely. Now that we have a purpose-built racecar, the workload has become less, because these guys were just killing themselves keeping the car running at the front, and now we have a car that's just like everything else – it's got a great motor from the factory, it's got a great suspension from the factory and we're not trying to fit a square hole into a round peg.

"I didn't expect us to be super competitive right out of the box, just because that's not how a new car is going to be. I'm really happy about the reliability we've had. I think we've finally found a baseline we can use for a lot of tracks in North America, which is great because the tracks here are quite a bit different than Europe, where the cars were developed.

"We're moving right along. I told my bosses at Honda Performance Development the first half of the year was going to be a struggle, the second half we'd have a top-five competing car. Maybe that's optimistic, but that's where I felt our progress was going to lead. We're in the top 10, we're fighting against some really good cars. This may not be our year to win races, but this is definitely our year to solidify what the car can do," he adds.