The announcement in recent days that Robert Wickens will join the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship Sprint rounds in a DXDT Racing Corvette has brought headlines about the inspirational progress that the much-loved racer has made since his 2018 IndyCar accident.
That progress has been helped in no small part by innovations. Bosch Motorsport’s hand-controlled electric braking system is one of them, and it has been recognised with the Don Burgoon Most Innovative Product in Motorsport of the Year Award at the World Motorsport Symposium in London.
The system was developed by Bosch Motorsport specifically for Robert Wickens, whose accident left him paralyzed from the waist down and reliant on hand controls for the accelerator and brake pedals in his race car.
Whilst there have been previous hand control systems solutions, they were not designed with the high functional requirements in motorsports.
To accommodate this for Wickens’ hand-controlled braking system, Bosch used its existing LMDh electronic brake system (EBS) module, whose controls platform and display provides a significantly more robust solution.
The tech allows Wickens exactly what he needs to achieve sensitive brake control and fast reaction times when braking. Built-in diagnostics ensure simple and reliable functional testing of the system too.
“I can’t thank DXDT enough for the opportunity, [and] Bosch for, frankly, making it all possible,” Wickens said in a recent press briefing about his 2025 programme.
“I’ve been wanting to move up to WeatherTech for quite some time. I felt like I was fairly transparent in that messaging.
“But it was always a difficult communication, trying to convince the OEMs or the team owners to put me in the car like any other racing driver – and then say, ‘Oh, by the way, you have to design a whole braking system that doesn’t exist.’
“So the fact that Bosch came to the table with their technology, it’s already proving that it’s giving me the opportunities that I want in my career. Not only just in this next journey, moving up into the IMSA WeatherTech Series, but we already raced it in the TCR category for the final two rounds of the Michelin Pilot Challenge series with great success.
“We’re really looking forward to the future, frankly. The off-season already feels too long, now that I know kind of what 2025 looks like – and [I’m] just ready to get started.”
