GTD pole-sitter Elliott Skeer anticipates an intense and thrilling start to the Daytona 24 Hours with the two GT classes starting separately.
When asked on the new change for this year by Motorsport Week during the post-qualifying press conference, he said:
“Yeah, it’s definitely with the new rules this year on the GTD to GTD Pro will be interesting for us especially.
“It minimises clean air, so we’re going to be spending a lot more time in dirty air, especially come restarts, which we know there’s going to be obviously a fair bit of in this race.
“Yeah, clean air on your own qualifying run is one thing, but then in the midst of what is going to be an incredible battle for an entire day, that’s going to be a whole new thing.
‘”So there is still so many things to learn, not just power side, but in battling in aero with some new drivers. There’s a lot to happen in a day’s worth of racing here.
“Who knows, right? Some of the guys you might pass a couple laps before on a restart are ahead of you again.
“They had to deal with it last year; we’re dealing with it this year.
“We’ll see where it evolves to. It does make it a little nicer, though, in terms of the guys around you are most likely for position, so it does clean up a little bit of that, but ultimately we need to go racing and see how it performs.”
How the change will affect the start in GTD and GTD Pro
Previously in the IMSA SportsCar Championship, the two GT classes – GTD and GTD Pro – were treated as one combined classification in qualifying.
This meant that all GT cars started exactly where they qualified regardless of their category.
As a result, this would set up a race grid order where GTD Pro cars started amongst the GTD field and likewise with certain GTD competitors performing better than some GTD Pro cars.
During the race start, this meant drivers were needlessly racing against cars not in their category and for relevant track position.
The 22 GTD cars will start together behind the 15 GTD Pro cars for the 63rd running of the Daytona 24 Hours, thus prosing a more challenging race start for the pole-sitters who will be unable to use none-class GT cars to shield their lead.
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