Detroit — Welcome to the Motor City Motorsports Wars.
The headliner this weekend for the Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix Presented by Lear is IndyCar, but the Detroit streets are also a showdown between hometown rivals in the IMSA Weathertech Sportscar support series. Dubbed the Chevrolet Detroit Sports Car Classic, the 4:10 p.m.-5:30 p.m. Saturday IMSA shootout is more like a football game between Big Blue and Big Yellow.
Ford vs. Chevy. Mustang vs. Corvette.
“It feels more like a big match or Super Bowl … two big teams fighting against each other, so it is important (to beat the Mustangs) for sure,” said Antonio Garcia, who is piloting the #3 Corvette Z06 GT3.R.
Ford dominated last year’s bout, with the #64 Mustang GT3 leading 55 of 81 laps while holding off a late charge from the Corvette team.
“Detroit is a big race for us as the Ford works team,” said Belgian Mustang driver Frederic Vervisch. “We’re going to visit some of the employees ahead of the race, so we hope to have lots of home support for the Mustang GT3s throughout the weekend.”
General Motors planted its flag for the weekend at 1232 Woodward Ave. with a spectacular display of its race cars in the GM Entrance One exhibition space at Hudson’s Detroit (part of its new downtown headquarters) less than a mile from the starting line.
“To race here, in our hometown, is super important,” said Jim Campbell, GM boss for Performance and Motorsports. “It’s a rallying point for our employees, and a lot of our suppliers are here.”
The Detroit GP, said Campbell, stands to gain from the Memorial Day weekend’s epic Indianapolis 500 — where the Honda-powered Meyer Shank IndyCar of Felix Rosenqvist beat the Chevrolet-powered Team Penske entry of David Malukas in the closest finish in Indy history.
“From a fan perspective, having another race immediately the next weekend is great,” said Campbell of the IndyCar series that shares the Detroit GP weekend with IMSA and Indy NXT, IndyCar’s junior feeder series. “(To have) the excitement, notoriety and scale of the Indy 500 — and to then come right here is huge.”
The Detroit Grand Prix Prix is an appropriate battelground for the Motown brands. Unlike the 500-mile Indiana oval race with cars slipstreaming at 220 mph, Detroit is a physical, 165-mile street fight.
A cage match.
The 10-turn, 1.6-mile circuit is lined with New Jersey barriers and catch fences. Corners are 90 degrees, the surface is rough, and 250 manhole covers have been welded shut so they aren’t sucked out of the ground by the winged race cars. Banging wheels is often the only way to make a pass, and sharp elbows will be out.
“Racing for the first time at a street circuit is always a steep learning curve, but it’s exactly the type of challenge that racing drivers love,” said Dennis Olsen, one of the drivers of the #64 Mustang GT3.
Every ‘Stang — including the Dark Horse GT3 cyborgs competing in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship — starts its life 25 miles south of Detroit at Flat Rock Assembly Plant, where the so-called body-in-white chassis is born.
It’s shipped to Ford partner Multimatic in Charlotte, North Carolina, where it is outfitted for IMSA and other races across the globe.
Corvettes make a different journey — the body-in-white birthed at GM’s Bowling Green Assembly in Kentucky. The chassis for the Corvette Z06 GT3.R race car is then shipped to New Hudson — 35 miles west of Detroit — where it is outfitted for battle by GM racing partner Pratt Miller.
Both Ford and Chevrolet now offer their GT3 racers for customer teams around the world. But for Detroit, only the factory-sponsored cars will compete this weekend in the GT-Pro class.
“Engines (for the Corvette) are prepared in our Pontiac (Powertrain Performance and Racing Center) facility here, and then we assemble the engine for our Indy car here in Plymouth, Michigan,” said Campbell, standing next to a Corvette GT3.R race car.
In addition to the technology transfer, marketing, and customer sales reasons for racing, Campbell emphasized the importance of exposing employees into the white-hot crucible of motorsports.
“When they come to racing, it’s highly competitive, fast-paced,” he said. “We race every seven to 14 days — ready or not — and (our employees) learn how to move at lightning speed, solving problems, taking advantage of opportunities. When we rotate them back to production jobs, they’re better for it, and so are we as a company.”
Fittingly, the pace car for the weekend races is the 1,250-horsepower Chevy Corvette ZR1X — which also paced the Indy 500 — driven by Ken Morris, GM Senior Vice President Product Programs, Safety, Integration and Motorsports.
“He does a lot of our final tuning,” said Campbell. “He goes to the Nürburgring to test our cars and other places like the Milford Proving Grounds.”
Racing has also raised the performance profile of Cadillac, which will also compete here this weekend with three of its wicked, mid-engine V-Series.R GTP racers — though not against Ford. Instead, another Motown brand — Team Penske — is the chief competition along with partner Porsche’s twin 963 GTP cars.
“Ford is in the GTD category, but we also see Porsche, Acura, BMW, Aston Martins,” said Campbell. “We see many of (our) competitors in that sports car segment. We want . . . to get to the to the top of the podium racing one or all of them.”
Then, he added: “It’s also great in this hometown when we have us and Ford in a great rivalry on track. It’ll be fun.”
Henry Payne is auto critic for The Detroit News. Find him at hpayne@detroitnews.com or @HenryEPayne.
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Detroit vs. Detroit: Motown brands vie for supremacy at Detroit Grand Prix
Reporting by Henry Payne, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
