Eight weeks ago, what should have been a routine drive up the California coastline turned into a disaster for DXDT Racing when its transporter caught fire en route to WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca.
After salvaging what they could, the team came back to Watkins Glen with a rebuilt #36 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R, but the same goals and ambitions that it did before, according to Competition Director Bryan Sellers – who admitted that he’d never experienced anything like that in 20 years as a championship-winning driver or, in recent years, on the management side of the sport.
“It was new for everybody. These are not things that most race programmes have gone through,” Sellers said this weekend.
“It’s everything from assessing what you should bring home from the fire, what you should leave, what insurance is actually going to cover, what you should replace that they won’t cover…and prioritising all of those things and trying to assess what was essential to getting back to here was difficult.
“Starting the team from ground zero on an IMSA programme was easier that the rebuild process we just had to do,” he admitted. “Because when you start from ground zero, you know exactly what direction you want to go with everything. You pick and choose the equipment you want, all the types of things that you need to make the programme successful. Whereas now, you don’t have enough time, budget, or capabilities to do that twice. You’re taking stuff that was pre-existing in the shop, you’re retrofitting it to make it work for now.
“It was a difficult task, for sure. The car was number one, and our timing stand isn’t 100 percent what it was. If some of those types of things aren’t outfitted exactly the way we needed them to be, we wouldn’t sacrifice on that at all.
DXDT Racing officially returned to the IMSA paddock on Wednesday with a new transporter, new awnings in the paddock, new pitlane equipment, and an older-stock Corvette Z06 GT3.R chassis from 2024. In fact, it’s the same chassis that scored the new GT3 Corvette’s first-ever win in global competition, two years ago at Circuit of the Americas in GT World Challenge America.
But that car then had to be stripped down from its SRO configuration and rebuilt with IMSA-approved harnesses and magneto-elastic torque sensors, and then rewrapped in its new blue and gold foil livery which debuted at Long Beach.
Apart from a spin in the second practice session, it’s been relatively smooth sailing for the crew of Mason Filippi – who’s back in a GT3 car for the first time since he and Robert Wickens raced at Long Beach – along with Salih Yoluç and Charlie Eastwood, who came in from Le Mans two weeks ago to continue their IMSA Michelin Endurance Cup campaign.
Sellers confirmed that DXDT will have a car ready for Wickens and Filippi for the upcoming Chevrolet Grand Prix at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park (formerly Mosport), complete with Wickens’ bespoke Bosch hand control system.
“One of the biggest directives we had as a programme was maintaining our commitments to our partners, to our customers, to our drivers – and he (Robert) was definitely a part of it,” said Sellers.
“That was one of the bigger undertakings that came into it, because we only had one set of hand control systems, period. They’re quite expensive, so carrying a set of spares wasn’t really a reality.
“That’s where our relationship with Pratt Miller came into play. They were great, they were on the phone with us every day, meeting at least once a week to try and help – timelines and progression of where they were at – and building a whole new system into place.
“The initial system took us about eight months to try and get from zero, and they were able to replicate the second set in under four weeks.”
DXDT Racing began competing in IMSA last year after more than a decade in the SRO America/Pirelli World Challenge system and has often shown the potential to win in GTD, but doesn’t yet have a podium finish to show for their efforts, and only when Wickens inherited the pole at Long Beach did the team get its first IMSA pole position.
If they were to somehow bounce back and get that first podium, let alone a first win, after an ordeal which could have brought the entire operation to an end, it could go down as of the great comeback stories in American sports car racing – not unlike Wickens’ personal comeback after a life-changing spinal cord injury to win races and a championship in IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge.
“It would mean everything, but probably in a different way than what people would expect,” Sellers remarked. “It’s tough, from my perspective, you sit back and watch how much these guys give, and I want it so bad for them. I care about it so much, not for myself, but for all the guys that just continue to spend late nights away from their families.
“Outside of the actual fire itself, it wasn’t just one big moment where you went, ‘oh my gosh, this is going to be tough.’ It was just moment after moment of it being tough. It feels like they didn’t ever have a break. One thing got done, and another thing came up.
“In reality, we could be recovering from this for months, years – because there are so many things in the shop now that are unusable.”
But despite these hardships they’ve faced, never was there a thought from Sellers, from Team Owner David Askew or General Manager Erin Gahagan, to bow out of the sport after their setback. “That was never going to come up from anybody inside the team,” Sellers said proudly. “This is what we’re here to do, and you’re never going to give up.
“Had he (David) chose not to continue, everybody would have understood. Even if that was a rebuild for the future. But it was never even an option for him. He was immediately like, ‘okay, what do we gotta do to get moving?’ As soon as he said that, it brings a smile to your face.”
And for Sellers, just being back on track won’t be enough to satisfy him, or any of the DXDT crew, even after all they’ve been through.
“We’ve showed such good potential all year long that now, just because we had something like this happen all of a sudden, accepting something less than what we had established earlier is not fair – to them, to the drivers, to our partners.
“When we got here, the mentality was not like, ‘hey, we’ll take this step-by-step.’ It’s immediately back to, we’re here, for one reason alone.
“We’ve had bumps on the road already, things that we weren’t prepared for, but still the same thing is once we get to the race, are we ready or are we not?”
The #36 DXDT Corvette starts 13th today at Watkins Glen after qualifying was nullified due to a mid-session accident. The prospect of fighting to the front of the GTD field, after all the team has gone through in the last month and a half, seems like an easy task in perspective.
Images © Jack Webster / dailysportscar.com
