Corvette Racing to Race with Spare Chassis for the No.4 C7.R at the Rolex 24

A couple weeks back during the Roar Before the 24 test weekend, the No.4 Corvette C7.R had caught fire after a fuel line failed, leaking gas into the hot engine bay which ignited. Marcell Fassler was behind the wheel at the time and was able to escape without injury, but the fire grounded both cars for the rest the Roar test.

According to Sportscar365.com, the car was evaluated and the damage wasn’t that significant, but due to the time crunch to get it ready, the team decided to go with the backup chassis.

Sportscar365 talked to Corvette Racing program manager Doug Fehan who described the situation:

“The firewall in the car is a composite firewall, but the fireproofing around that area worked really, really well. But it needs to be replaced. When we looked at the timeframe between the Roar and what we have here, it just made a tremendous amount of sense to get the spare car up and running, to enter it here so we could take our time doing a proper repair on the original chassis. As soon as we get it back up and running, why we’ll get it back in competition. It was very nice having a spare car ready to go.”

Corvette Racing’s backup chassis was initially built for last year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans following a 2015 incident at Le Mans where Jan Magnussen crashed during a training session, which caused too much damage for the team to rebuild the car at the track. So last year, they took three Corvettes to France, the two primary C7.Rs and the backup chassis.

Fehan says the fuel line failure during the Roar test was a “harmonics-related issue” that was tracked back to a custom part that the shop fabricated. While it had been tested on the dyno and validated during a 60-hour run, it failed during the Roar test due to the harmonics from the race car on the race track.

The good news is that Fehan doesn’t believe it’s something to worry about for the Rolex 24 after they have reverted back to their “old-style pumps”, saying “We should be fine for this race, but planning for the future it’s imperative that we can find a solution we can use.”

Source:
Sportscar365.com

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