Nothing is left unattended....
Nothing is left unattended. Here, Binks polishes the pegs onto which the wheel is located.
Back at Sebring International Raceway, the team prepared the C6.Rs for Thursday's early warm-up laps and subsequent qualifying session. Once qualifying was completed, crew members began readying the cars for competition on Saturday. For a long race such as Sebring, this process involves a "freshening up" of the entire car, including changing out the engine and rear transaxle. The pace is fevered; this year's SIR qualifying session was over by 4:00 p.m., and the engine was swapped out in time for the two-hour night practice at 7:00 p.m.
This year's Friday schedule included replacing the transaxle and performing a complete clean-up and race prep-pretty typical pre-event fare. But Sebring '07 also held a special surprise for the Corvette faithful. P&M and General Motors had arranged to transfigure the No. 3 car into a race-spec clone of the special-edition Ron Fellows Z06 announced just days earlier. This meant that the team had to strip the No. 3 car down to its frame and roll cage, leaving none of the familiar yellow bodywork.
The Corvette Racing staff had secretly prepared all of the new body parts beforehand, allowing the car to appear in its usual livery throughout the week. It meant a lot more work for the team to squeeze into an already busy schedule, but they were all smiles as they celebrated their friend and his racing legacy.
Robin Pratt (right) and Debbie...
Robin Pratt (right) and Debbie Johnson keep in constant motion, supplying team members with food and supplies.
Saturday's morning practice was quick and uneventful, but as the team was rolling the cars back to the garage for a final inspection, No. 4 sprang a leak in one of its flexible, three-foot oil lines. The crew leaped into action, replacing the leaking hose with a spare from their large cache of parts.
Shortly afterwards, the No. 3 team discovered that the car's newly replaced transaxle was beginning to ooze fluid. Knowing that the part would not last the grueling 12-hour race, Crewchief Dan Binks made the call for a hurried replacement. This meant an unscheduled 20-minute change-out (a job that might take your local mechanic four hours or more), with the car making it out of the garage just in time for the reconnaissance lap. Fellows was even granted a solo parade lap to show off the newly liveried Corvette to the ALMS crowd.
One of the crew's biggest challenges during the race involves maintaining a constant supply of fresh tires. A pit stop and tire change are made approximately once every hour. At Sebring, that meant a minimum of 12 pit stops and 12 sets of tires were required for each car. Complicating matters is the fact that Corvette Racing's tire supplier, Michelin, is very protective of its technology, and only dispenses tires on an as-needed basis. In fact, the team is only allowed to keep one set of "scale tires" to use in setting up the cars' chassis and suspensions. Any leftover tires are returned to Michelin after the event.
Ron Helzer (left), of engine...
Ron Helzer (left), of engine builder Katech, and team member David James start the morning by readying a new LS7 race motor for installation.
Because of these restrictions, there is a constant train running to and from the Michelin transporter during the race, returning used tires and bringing fresh ones to be used at the next pit stop. Each set of tires has to be mounted and balanced at the Michelin area, taken back to the hot pit, inflated to the pressures required by the team's engineers, marked, and set into the pit space, ready to be used at a moment's notice. With each pit stop, the whole sequence starts over.
At the end of the race, the team had good cause (First and Second in class and Seventh and Eighth overall) to pause for celebration. The festivities were short-lived, however, as the team was scheduled to travel to Road Atlanta for two days of testing the very next week. This year's race schedule is particularly busy, with a total of four races falling between Sebring and Corvette Racing's ultimate challenge-the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
So what does it take to make winning look easy? In the case of Corvette Racing, the elements range from design, development, assembly, and racing expertise, to hard work, experience, and an unflagging will to do whatever it takes to succeed. What we see as two brightly colored Corvettes flashing around the track is, in fact, the culmination of a Herculean effort on the part of the 120 employees of Pratt & Miller and their comrades at GM Racing.
 Crew member Steve Longhi checks...  Crew member Steve Longhi checks the pressure of a tire that was just removed during a pit stop. |  Corvette Racing's truck drivers...  Corvette Racing's truck drivers set up this "home away from home" days before the rest of the team arrives. |  The Corvette Racing crew checks...  The Corvette Racing crew checks over every inch of the C6.Rs prior to the race. Then they do it again. |