Congrats to Mike Hedlund with Starworks

Thanks! Will be a busy 2015... should be fun though! The changes they're making for the LMPC cars in 2015 should make the GTLM and LMPC racing much better for everyone.

-mike

 

Hey Mike,
Will we see you at the 24hrs in a few weeks.
Best,
John

 

Saw that! MUCH better!

 

Congrats Mike. It just gets better and better watching you soar. Go get em!

 

Good luck, Mike! Nice coverage at Racer.com. Keep going!
IMSA - IMSA: High ambitions for Hedlund

 

People have so much hostility towards anyone who strives to achieve their goals. Nice article, those morons in the comments section need to be smacked. Jealousy.

 

ridiculous. every one of us would do exactly as Mike does if we had the means

plus Mike is a genuinely good guy who shares a TON about the sport, not only here but on Twitter and his blog. he should be a fan favorite.

 

This is very true. It's usually people with no clue about the sport. Take all the paying drivers out of the fields and... No one gets to race because the fields are so small. But there will always be guts carping about how it used to be different in the good old days. And it wasn't.

 

Nice driving mike

 

Thanks! Shame we had bad luck with an alternator failing and then the engine going kablooey at around 3AM.

I was very disappointed with the new LMPC engine regulations though. Apparently they never bothered to test it before the race.. because we were slower on top speed and worse off the corners with the new engine regs (and slower in overall lap time). Woops!

Made navigation GTD/GTLM very difficult throughout the race and why you saw a lot of aggressive LMPC passes in the infield...

-mike

 

I was going to ask why they weren't faster. The times were very similar to GTLM. Sorry about the blowup, but look on the bright side...you raced 24hrs of Daytona along the greatest drivers of our generation and previous generations and ran 2nd in your stint. No engine failure can take that away from you.

 

what happened to the engine? rod broke? saw the pic of a giant hole in the block....

as for the AoP adjustments...what happened? I thought restrictor + new cams were supposed to give more power/straightline speed...did the ride height rules counteract that? (i.e. more downforce, but more drag, so slower top end despite a bit more power)?

 

Ridiculous. People are so obnoxious - easy to criticize from their armchairs!

 

The new cams reduced engine torque (in an attempt to make the car easier to drive I guess), but they increased the rev limit for the motor. However, the LS3 just doesn't make more power in the higher RPM's so the rev limit increase didn't increase top speed and making less torque made the car slower.

At the Roar we ran the old engine (same physical engine the team won Petit with at the end of 2014) but without the restrictor and it was awesome. It still lacked top speed compared to the other classes but was much stronger off the corner.

-mike

 

so why were all the PC team owners/engineers clamoring for the new cams? surely they would know about the torque/power curves....

TUSCC LMPC Regulations To Be Tweaked

 

Because the idea was to increase the top speed of the car, which EVERYONE wants. However, the changes were not properly tested and didn't have the desired effect (the cars were slower in terms of lap time AND top speed).

-mike

 

d'oh!

 

Congrats on the podium at Laguna mike

 

Thanks! Probably toughest race I've ever been a part of... and it was only a 2 hour and 40 minute race.

-mike

 

Are you doing the 6 hours at the glen?

 

traffic/passing was nuts...it seemed like at least once a lap I saw contact between two cars or someone dropping wheels off track. a shame, as the field was no bigger than previous ALMS races there...

any thoughts on IMSA's proposed GT3 sprint format series? I see two big problems, one being where to fit it into the schedule without dropping another series or shortening the Conti races, and second where will the budgets come from. it seems the entire sports car racing universe is searching after the same dollar (gentleman drivers willing to fund the team), at what point do series start getting really watered down, or start failing completely.

 

Yessir. I'll be in the #8 Starworks car for the Glen and Petit.

I think it'd be great. There needs to be more competition for entries in order to make each series work harder -- and there's plenty of people interested in running GT3 cars to support 2 series. It wasn't like ALMS/Rolex GT where they were fighting over 20 GT entries for 2 series.

I asked Scott Atherton point blank at Laguna if there was going to be some sort of IMSA GT3 sprint series -- and if there wasn't, there should be. I'm not sure if what he told me was on or off the record so I won't repeat it.

The thing people get confused by, is endurance and sprint racing are completely different beasts. You won't lose entries from the Tudor series. All it is, is a viable option for those that can't afford to run the GT3 endurance races (which is almost everyone. a Tudor season GT3 budget is around $2.5-3M per year, not including cost of the car). The PWC budget is around $500k. Every driver and team would prefer to do the endurance races, but it's simply not an option for many teams/drivers.

-mike

 

I guess that's what I'm getting at...there's a finite number of gentlemen drivers with the talent, desire and budget to go GT racing, and I'm wondering what that number is and if it's big enough to support all the pro-am/gentlemen driver series out there. as it stands there's already GT3 Cup, Ferrari Challenge, Super Trofeo, CTSC, PWC, 2 classes in IMSA, 2 classes in WEC, Blancpain, VLN. yes they all have different cars/schedules/formats/budgets but they're all chasing the same dollar.

what's the cost for doing GTD in the NAEC on a "buy a ride" basis? I'm assuming that's roughly the same as full season PWC and roughly the same amount of seat time?

thanks for being so open (and honest!) about your experiences!