SEBRING, Fla.—The second year of the Tudor United SportsCar Championship is starting with a roster of firsts.
For the first time since 2000, the same drivers and car won both the Rolex 24 at Daytona and the 12 Hours of Sebring. For the first time since 1965, a Chevrolet-powered prototype won the 12 Hours of Sebring. For the first time in series history, the winning car lapped the field.
Action Express Racing wasn’t particularly dominant in practice or qualifying; the team’s Coyote-Corvette was quickest in the first session but not in any other, and qualified three-tenths off the pole. But as driver Christian Fittipaldi said after winning the race, “A 12-hour race is a team effort—you can’t win with just a fast car.
“What makes this team strong is we always try to improve. After Daytona, this team analyzed everything we did good and all the small mistakes we made. We always try to improve and if we can’t we at least minimize the mistakes.”
This approach works for Action Express and Fittipaldi and co-drivers Joao Barbosa, and Sebastien Bourdais: as of the end of Sebring, the team completed 10415 miles of racing—every lap of every race in the two-year-old Tudor championship—without a single mechanical failure, always finishing on the lead lap.
Along the way the team won the 2014 Tudor Championship Prototype title and the North American Endurance Cup—and are halfway to winning the Cup again (and have a healthy lead in championship points as well.)
