BUSINESS
race in Argentina, there was an almighty accident that wiped out five cars. Up in the stewards room, the man the drivers had to face was Mark Raffauf, managing director of competition at Grand Am, and a man who had experience straightening out the driving habits of some of the sports ‘wilder’ pilots. Raffauf has a reputation of
A
being a straight talker, and there is no nonsense when it comes to setting out the law for drivers. ‘Yep, we straightened [Jan Magnussen] up, and stopped Max Angelelli from hitting everything but the tow truck,’ says the American, who sent Magnussen on a community project with children, or ‘finger painting’ as the Dane put it, after he was accused of causing an avoidable accident. ‘You could have lifted,’ he was told, to which he replied, ‘You don’t know me very well,’ before signing up as a factory Corvette driver. ‘I had to dock Negri a race,
McDowell, Colin Braun, I said you can crash all you want, just do it on your own. If you take someone with you, you are going to hear from me,’ says Raffauf. ‘There are guys like Angelelli, who is the best braker I have ever seen, and I have been doing this for 30 years. He has the skill that allows him to outbrake people in places they don’t expect without touching them. That is what it is all about, which is why we use 14in steel rotor [disc] brakes – lousy by European standards, but braking distances are longer, and a driver can do it.’
THESE ARE KEEPERS The new Daytona Prototypes are better looking than their predecessors, but Raffauf says he is looking for longevity in the equipment. With a quick change of a rollcage and some new bodywork, the old cars can easily be adapted and the teams can continue to compete. ‘The new car is essentially the same as the old one. In fact, two of the five Corvettes are built on the same car – one on a Riley
s the field of cars headed towards the start line of the final round of the FIA GT1 World Championship
‘I saw pictures of the new
Aston Martin GT3 car, which is supposed to be a 750bhp V12, but how many gentlemen drivers should drive that? That is my personal comment. If that is the marker you are going for, you are crazy. You don’t need to do that to go fast. If that is for pros, but how many gentlemen should be doing that?’
Criticism is often levelled at the American racing scene for its lack of technological advances – NASCAR has only just gone to fuel injection, for example – and, as European manufacturers look to alternative drivetrain technologies, will Grand Am follow suit?
‘Our emphasis and focus is
Converting an existing car into a new generation Daytona Prototype is a quick, relatively inexpensive solution that gives teams longevity
and one on a Dallara chassis,’ says Raffauf. ‘They are easily made into that configuration. You can build a new car, but it is not necessary to do that. You can reasonably put on a new body and rollcage quickly and relatively inexpensively. It is basically cutting the old rollcage off and putting in a different one, with new attachment points. It is a fairly easy thing that the constructors can do it in less than a week.
power to 500bhp. As with the Daytona Prototypes, engines are submitted for testing at the Concord Dyno Tech Center, and the aero is tested at the Windshear wind tunnel. Parity is observed, and the cars are then passed to race. ‘What we did was take GT3-
derived cars, and we looked at power and aerodynamics. After working with them – in the case of Ferrari, from its inception or, in the case of Audi, after they
“You can put on a new body and rollcage quickly and relatively
inexpensively… the constructors can do it in less than a week”
‘We realised that with
500bhp, at somewhere like Daytona, you can do more than 200mph, and we didn’t see where that added much to the entertainment. So we made some changes – with things like a big frontal area and vertical sides. This bodywork is extremely functional.’ With Raffauf in the swing of things, it seemed an opportune moment to tackle the issue of performance balancing. This year, Ferrari and Audi will race in the GT class with their modified GT3 cars but, with costs and balance in mind, what was the American’s approach? Simple. Limit their
built the GT3 – we said, “this will work, if you take the extra 150bhp out of it, and if you take the aerodynamics down a step or two.” They said that is not that hard to do. ‘There are no rules in GT3.
You can build what you want, run it, and then they have to figure out how to balance it. We do it the exact other way. The Audi V10 will be on our dynos, the same as the Ferrari V8 was, and the Dodge 8.0-litre, long before it is seen in competition, and we decide how it is going to run. The response from Ferrari when we asked is that you could run this engine for the year.
on competition, and it would be really cool to demonstrate new technology but, if there is no competition, you cannot sell tickets or show it on TV. And without the ability to do that, it is not competition.
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD ‘With all due respect, if you don’t have that package, you are there for fourth or fifth at best. In DP, every guy there has the chance to win the race. It is up to the people, the teams and the drivers to execute the competition. That is what the sport is about. People compete against people, and it is a team game. If one team is playing with a different ball, that is not our philosophy to do that. ‘Does it mean that we won’t? No, it means we don’t know how to do that. We will embrace the technology, but how, and in what form, I don’t know.’ What if someone developed
an off-the-shelf KERS system? ‘As long as mechanics weren’t getting electrocuted and stuff like that. There are all those stories, which are true. We are not closed minded, but we are business like, and we have stockholders, so we have to make intelligent decisions for ourselves, race tracks and participants. The track has to be successful or you have no place to race. We have to bring television, the competitors have to have a viable, sustainable programme that is not millions of dollars a year, and our track record is pretty good.’
February 2012 •
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