RACING: Can Corvette Racing Secure One Last Championship?

For anyone who follows the Corvette Racing program, it is well known that the 2023 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season will be the last year that a factory-backed Corvette will participate in the series.  This certainty has left millions of Corvette Racing fans clamoring for one, final championship as the Chevrolet/Pratt Miller Engineering duo ride off (both literally and figuratively) prepares for their final race at Road Atlanta in a couple weeks.

Virginia International Raceway (VIR)

Back in August, drivers Antonio Garcia and Jordan Taylor secures a GTD Pro class vctory during the sixth round of the 2023 IMSA WeatherTech season.  This race, which took place at Virginia International Raceway on August 27, gave the team a much needed “shot in the arm” in terms of points standing.  Although the team remained in second place (behind the leading Lexus race team), the victory gave the team a much-needed victory and a fair amount of hope for the remainder of the season.

The victory at VIR came on the heals of a devastating finish at Road America on August 6th.  Drivers Garcia and Taylor were expected to win at that event too, but a late race drive-thru penalty (that had been assessed when the team missed the rules-mandated minimum fueling time by less than a second), cost them the win and the points that would have come with it.   The race at VIR was no sure thing either, with the team dealing with a heat wave that saw air temperatures skyrocket into the upper 90s (degrees fahrenheit) that created challenging track conditions and, arguably, impaced qualifying times.  In fact, Garcia, who scored a best lap time of 1:45.133 (at an average speed of 111.972 miles per hour) in the No. 3 Corvette C8.R qualified third, a result that was, in a word, disappointing to the driver.

“These were tricky conditions,” Garcia said after qualifying. “The track is warm, and it was difficult to gauge the lap and the grip together with the setup we decided to go with in qualifying. We probably didn’t do the correct thing. The car wasn’t doing as I was expecting, so that led to a few mistakes. It’s only qualifying but we should be there for the race. We are still close.”