SEBRING, Fla.—The 2014 Tudor United SportsCar Championship Winter Test is underway at Florida’s Sebring International Raceway. For the rest of today and all of Friday, the fastest sports cars in North America will be lapping the bumpy 3.74-mile, 17-turn racetrack, preparing for the Sebring 12 Hours in March.
Traditionally the Winter Test has been the first outing for the teams since the end of the previous season; team would bring whatever they had invented or devised over the off-season and see how it all worked on Sebring’s punishing concrete.
This year, all that has changed due to the unification of the American Le Mans Series and the Rolex Sportscar Series into TUSC. The Sebring 12 Hour is no longer the season opener; teams did several days of testing at Daytona in early January and raced in the Rolex 24 at the end of that month. Most teams already have more miles on their cars now than they had had by May of any other year.
This year’s test serves a very different purpose: rebalancing performance between the various cars in various classes, but most important, working out the balance between in the premier Prototype class, where the lighter, less powerful, but much more aerodynamic P2s compete with the more powerful but much heavier Daytona Prototypes.
The DPs are running all their added aero parts at Sebring—the dive planes and diffusers that were removed for Daytona have been re-installed. The DPs, a few hundred pounds heavier are now making almost as much downforce as the P2s, while still making about 150 more horsepower.
