INSIGHT: Building Cadillac Chip Ganassi Racing

By the end of that late Saturday night at Petit Le Mans in 2019, Ford Chip Ganassi Racing had reached its farewell point in IMSA’s WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. Shortly afterward, the Blue Oval’s Ford GTs would be returned and the formidable two-car GT Le Mans team would be reassigned, for the most part, to different wings of Ganassi’s multi-series racing operation.

As Ganassi contemplated life without sports car racing, the majority of FCGR’s IMSA crew members were headed for the team’s NTT IndyCar Series programs, including IMSA team manager Mike O’Gara. To their surprise, a new IMSA project landed one year after the Ford effort folded. And with an urgent need to create Cadillac Chip Ganassi Racing to compete in the DPi class, O’Gara and the team’s hierarchy had approximately three months to reconstitute a sports car program.

Adding to the complexity, CGR expanded to four IndyCar entries for 2021 before the Cadillac program was finalized, which made pulling its former IMSA team back to the WeatherTech Championship paddock all but impossible. With the exception of a few returnees, CCGR is a fresh assembly of endurance racers, which makes for a unique opportunity with the help of O’Gara to go inside their process of creating a title-contending DPi outfit without the luxury of extensive time and testing on their side.

Pivoting back to IMSA

“A year ago, the Ford program went away, and at the same time, we were adding Marcus Ericsson to the IndyCar program, so luckily, we were able to place almost most everybody from the IMSA program onto his No. 8 Honda,” O’Gara told RACER. “We sprinkled a couple other guys on the No. 9 and No. 10 cars. So, all was good. And then, towards the end of the summer, we got this new IndyCar deal done with Jimmie Johnson.

“So we're going to add another car, so I set about trying to add a car's worth of people. And a car's worth of people that are worthy of a program like Jimmie's, without destroying what we had on the other cars. Obviously, Scott Dixon's program was successful last year. The 10 car with Felix Rosenqvist was successful. They won a race. Marcus really hit his stride at the end of the year. So you don't want to destroy that by siphoning people off of what’s working there.

“And then a few weeks after the Jimmie Johnson deal got done, this Cadillac opportunity sprung up. Chip always said he wanted to go back IMSA racing, but he wanted to do it with the right program and in the proper way. The Ford program was a dream program for six years total, two years with the DP and four the GT cars. I mean, great partners, good funding, success, best sports car drivers in the world. It was a dream deal to be able to be a part of it. So taking a year off was a bummer, but this new Cadillac program is pretty darn exciting, and we get to go race for overall wins.”

Staffing the No. 01 Cadillac DPi-V.R

“The Dallara chassis is, in our opinion, the one to have if you're going to go DPi racing, and to do it with GM is that much better. So we started building this team, and I managed to steal a couple of guys and get them back on the sports car program. Trevor Montgomery has been with us forever – been a sports car guy, been an IndyCar guy. He's one of these utility players that you plug him in and stuff just gets done. So it was awesome that he was interested in coming back. A name familiar to the IMSA paddock is actually going to crew chief the car, and that's Phil Binks (ED: son of long-time – and recently-retired – Corvette Racing crew chief Dan).

"We wanted to promote from within, and looked at a lot of different options. And again, without wanting to pull someone else off of the IndyCar program, Phil’s name rose to the top. Management at the Indy shop huddled and said, ‘Let's see if Phil wants to do it.’ He and a few of the guys worked through Christmas and New Year's, and got this car put together. It got loaded on the truck Friday night, about 2:30 a.m., to head down to Sebring. So far, Phil's done a great job in leading his guys as we’ve recruited new people to work with us.

O'Gara (pictured in 2018, during Ganassi's Ford era), has had his work cut out building CGR's Cadillac DPi team from scratch. Dole/Motorsport Images

“John Hennek is going to engineer the car. He's been with us for a long, long time – did our DP program, helped out on Dixon's car last year as a performance engineer. He was a clear choice to engineer the car. And he's one of those guys that just grabs the bull by the horns. You know, the words were barely out of our mouths that we were going to do this program, and he wanted Dallara's parts books, and user manuals, and any data he could get, and build sheets and aero maps. He's taken the ball and run with it. And you'll see some other guys come and go, especially with Daytona luckily not being a conflict with the IndyCar schedule. There's some guys that are going to be doing some double duty to help get this thing off the ground.

“Brought a few other guys in from outside, both for the Cadillac and to supplement the IndyCars. I had this big grid. I felt like it was a big one of those sliding number puzzles to get guys that I felt were going to gel and work together. And you have to take a chance on some people that may not have IMSA or IndyCar experience. And we've done that. We've taken a chance on some guys that don't have any racing experience at all. But as [CGR managing director] Mike Hull likes to say, we get them in our system and get them doing things the way we want it done, and it works out. So far, everything is looking good.”

Driver selection

CCGR hired ex-Wayne Taylor Racing Cadillac driver Renger van der Zande and former Haas F1 driver Kevin Magnussen to lead the No. 01 Cadillac for the season. Scott Dixon, who drove WTR’s Cadillac last year, will join the Dutch-Danish tandem at IMSA’s longest races, and Ericsson will serve as a standby for the upcoming Rolex 24 At Daytona if there’s a need for a replacement driver.

Although the team has vast sports car experience, van der Zande finds himself in an enviable place as a driver who knows more about the DPi-V.R than his new employers, and those he’ll drive with in 2021.

“Obviously, there are a lot of factors between Chip and Mike Hull on who they ultimately wanted to drive for us,” O’Gara said. “They've got a pretty good track record of finding good guys to drive our race cars. The process when we did the GT program was, Mike and I sat down and made a list, and we just worked our way down the list. The Cadillac deal is a similar thing, but for the Ford GT, we didn't have anybody with Ford GT experience. So, we were looking at other GTLM drivers.

“For the Cadillac, we had great Cadillac talent available. Obviously we have Dixon, and he's driven that car some, but not developed that car like Renger has. So, with our compressed timeline... If we had six months to go test this car, work out the bugs and learn it and all of its nuances, maybe we would have taken a chance on a non-Cadillac driver. But with the compressed schedule of getting this thing in-house-built and on the track, we knew we needed a guy that can hop in the car and say, ‘Yep, you're on the right track, or this isn't right.’ And Renger's name came up immediately. He was at the top of our list from day one, when we started talking to GM about the program. GM's very high on him. They do a good job of watching drivers and rating drivers, and they were happy to share that data with us. But of guys that were available, Renger was right there at the top of their list and ours also. He spent this past week in the shop, and he’s such a professional.

“With Dallara, we've come up with a baseline setup, and that's what we're going to start with. We've obviously got a super compact schedule to get the things sorted out, and Dallara has been incredible so far in helping us get up to speed. Renger is going to hop in the car [on Tuesday] when we run it at Sebring, and he's going to say, ‘Yes,’ or, ‘No.’ And we'll work together on how to get it in the window for rolling off the truck at Daytona and being competitive. He just wants to learn and get better. And that's what we're all about. You know how we are. We're all about developing our people, and drivers are included in that.”

The matter of integrating Magnussen into a new team, in an unfamiliar car, amid an F1 season that ran into December, and while he and his wife were awaiting the arrival of a baby, has made for fun times in O’Gara’s world.

“Soon after Chip and Mike started talking to Kevin, I got in touch with him and we started chatting. And he’s been really laid back, easygoing guy so far. He's a beast in the car, but outside the car, he's been so pleasant to work with. And normally when we hire a guy who's never driven one of our cars, the first thing you do is send them a bunch of data to start looking at. Well, we don't even have any data to send to him to look at it because we’ve never run the car.

“So Hennek took a picture of the steering wheel and drew arrows to the buttons and said, ‘We think this one is the pit speed limiter. And we're pretty sure this one with the microphone on it is the radio button…’ We hadn't even powered the car up at that point. We got the car and immediately blew the thing apart.

“We sent Kevin a picture of the steering wheel, sent him some YouTube links to in-car Cadillac DPi videos and said, ‘Watch this!’ And I said, ‘Do you do iRacing stuff?’ And he said, ‘Oh, not really. I mean, I can, but I'm not really into that sort of thing.’ So, we said, ‘Okay, fine. The week before this Sebring test, Dallara has their state-of-the-art simulator in Speedway, Indiana, so come on over, hang out with us for the week and you can at least drive with the simulator. We'll do laps at Daytona and Sebring, and you can get your head around that."

“[Last] Monday morning when I woke up, he was due to fly over, and I had a couple of panicked voicemails and emails from Kevin’s handler saying, ‘You need to get hold Kevin right away.’ Another flight got canceled, another something else happened, and lo and behold, baby Magnusson shows up early and throws a wrench into those plans. Luckily, Kevin's wife and baby are both safe and everything's good, but we'd still yet to meet face to face before Sebring, and he didn't get the simulator time. He obviously hung out with his family to the week to make sure things were settled in there before he came over here. Didn’t make it to the shop, didn’t have the ability to make a proper seat, so we have good old two-part foam seat kits for his first outing.”

Refocusing ahead of Daytona

Official testing for the Rolex 24 At Daytona begins later this week, and then the series moves into race mode with Round 1 of the WeatherTech Championship ready to go over the weekend of Jan. 30-31. Dixon has plenty of seat time, and van der Zande doesn’t need many laps before CCGR drives north from Sebring to Daytona, so Magnussen has become the focus of the team’s final pre-season efforts.

As the only member of the team to already be familiar with the Cadillac DPi-V.R., van der Zande will be an important resource in CGR's quest to roll off the truck in good shape at Daytona. Image via CGR

“The plan now is to have Renger hop in and make sure the Cadillac is in a drivable window, and then Sebring is going to be more about getting Kevin up to speed than tuning on the car," O'Gara says. "We just need to make sure the car goes, and stops, and turns and shifts with Renger, and then let Kevin loose to find his way with it.

“Kevin's new to sports cars and endurance racing, so he going to be the guy we're going to work with to get into the sports car mentality of caring for the car, watching curbs, and then go race hard in hours 22 and 23 at Daytona. And he's got to be ready to do qualifying pace for 20 hours. I have no concern whatsoever about getting him up to speed. It's going to be more when to use that speed, and when to attack.”

Answers are coming

Few top-tier factory IMSA programs have been built in the brief period available to CCGR. O’Gara credits all the key partners and crew members who’ve fashioned something out of nothing in record time. They’ll know by the end of the month if all the effort translated into a competitive 24-hour debut.

“The support we've gotten from Dallara is insane; we've had their guys at our shop,” he said. “The ECR engine guys, they sent guys up to for our first startup, and all that has gone flawlessly. So we've got loads of support at the track. And the sooner we can get through the new-car stuff in testing, the sooner we can start pushing. And after Daytona, we're going to look at some other test dates in the spring to get Kevin to some other tracks and stretch his legs a little bit on a natural terrain road course.

“A mountain of work has already been done, but plenty more still to do to get through. But one of our goals is to win the 24 Hours of Daytona. And I don't see why we can't. We've had plenty of success there. We've got the smartest engineers and the best mechanics. And I don't see any reason why we can't unload and be duking it out on Sunday afternoon at the end of the 24-hour race. So, that's our plan, anyway.”