SEBRING, Fla.—The #5 Action Express Coyote-Corvette was the quickest car around Sebring’ 17 turns in the morning session of the final day of the Tudor United SportsCar Championship Winter Test.
The #5AEX Daytona Prototype lapped the 3.74-mile track in 1:52.488, 0.008 slower than its best lap Thursday afternoon, at an average speed of 119.693 mph.
Next fastest was the #42 P2 Oak Racing Morgan-Nissan which beat its best Thursday time with a lap of 153.230 at 118.908 mph, followed by another P2, the Muscle Milk/Pickett Racing Oreca-Nissan at 153.587 and 118.535 mph—a full second’s improvement over its best lap from the prior day, 1:54.590.
The #90 Spirit of Daytona Coyote-Corvette DP and the #1 P2 Extreme Speed Motorsports HPD ARX-03b filled out the top five. Six of the top ten prototypes were DPs the other four P2s—a pretty fair mix.
The TUSC competition team led by Scot Elkins deserves high praise for balancing the P2s and DPs. The two cars are radically different from design philosophy to construction; getting the two types of cars to run equivalent lap times on tracks as different as Daytona and Sebring was way beyond what most people thought was possible, yet at each track the same two cars—the fastest of each class—are running almost the same gap of just over 0.7 seconds.
The Daytona Prototype owners have had to lay out a lot of cash for new aero parts, but they have taken off a few seconds per lap in lap time—and not incidentally are providing North American sports car fans with enough prototypes to make TUSC’s top class viable.
Porsche Owns GTLM
North America’s top GT has never needed help. Whether it was called GT2 or GTE or GTLM, the class features factory-backed entries from Corvette, SRT Dodge, BMW, Ferrari, Porsche, and Aston Martin, plus some privateers which are about as quick as the factory cars.
At the Winter Test Porsche has had the upper hand so far, with one of its Porsche North America entries quickest of the field in each session and the other second or third.
Friday morning the #912 car was quickest with a lap of 2:00.41 at 112.162 mph, the quickest GT lap of the Test so far, with the #911 0.065 seconds and 0.59 mph back.
The #3 Corvette C7.R was third in class with a lap of 2:00.643 at 111.602. The top six cars broke into the two-minute range, and the top eight were less than half a second off the leader’s pace.
