Gradient Racing – Looking Forward
Gradient Racing have been part of the IMSA scene for some years ago, the Austin, Texas-based team stepping up to a full Michelin Endurance Cup campaign in 2022 with their Acura NSX GT3 Evo2 after selected IMSA outings in previous seasons. Long-time customer (and new Lola Cars owner) Till Bechtolsheimer, HPD factory driver Mario Farnbacher and Development driver Kyffin Simpson (joined at Daytona and Sebring by Marc Miller) have crewed the #66 car – and whilst the results have been tough to find, the pace has been there throughout.
A late addition to their 2022 IMSA programme came with a request from HPD to represent the brand at the Acura Grand Prix at Long Beach, the NSX joining the pair of ARX05 DPis on track to fly the flag.
At the very start of the year the DSC Editor sat down with team co-owner and Principal Andris Laivins to talk about the background story of the team, the challenges for a team through and beyond the pandemic, the challenges and choices ahead as sportscar racing enters a new and exciting era.
First though there’s an establishing question for Andris – with the team emerging from what had been CJ Wilson Racing, the ex MLB star having been a co-owner through the build up through MX5 Cup and CTSC before leaving the sport,
Andris, why Gradient?
“When CJ and I decided to split the team back up, I took on a partner, a good friend of mine, who wants to play an anonymous role.
“We went through a long naming exercise where we just made a list of things that we thought were were reasonable. Including that there are no existing race teams that we can be confused for. Somewhat benign, and that would be professional but inoffensive to auto manufacturers.
“There’s a lot of really terrible team names. There’s a lot of team names that are very difficult to Google and to find on social media, because their name is like, Performance Racing, Inc, or something, or insert three letter initials.
“Gradient, in this case is really just sort of an upward trajectory word. And that’s it!”
Stepping up to the Michelin Endurance Cup is a big step this season?
“Long term, we’ve always wanted to be in the big races. And, by extension, of course, we always want to be in all of the races, but you have got to start somewhere. The financial nut to crack to do this stuff is a crazy number. (c.$3.5 million)
That’s a big number!
“There’s no cheap parts on these cars. And the the ongoing upkeep and maintenance to just keep it fresh year to year, especially coming to a big race like this, you spend a crazy amount of money on it. I couldn’t tell you exactly what the total is just getting ready for this race. But it’s six figures.
Being the only Acura brings pluses and minuses?
“I’ve often said that being the only car of some particular manufacturer is not always a bad thing. But there’s definitely some strength if you have other cars that you would consider teammates. We raised the first season in IMSA with the NSX and MSR Michael Shank was still here.
“They’re a very friendly, open, welcoming team. They were HPDs nominated, factory type programme. It would be a stretch to say we collaborated with them, but they were always very kind and helpful if we needed to knock ideas back and forth about where we were on setup on a given weekend and things like that.
“But being the only car here you’re definitely on a little bit of an island. There’s nobody else to use as a benchmark. You just have to rely on the drivers to tell you that we’re in the right place on setup, as opposed to just saying, Oh, well, the other Acura can go a second a lot faster. So there’s some effort you got to put in there.
“Also, being the only Acura, then, all the laps we produce are the ones that are used to factor into the BOP equation. There’s always a lot of talk about, “should we be careful about how fast we go?”
“I think the reality is that IMSA genuinely does do a good job with the BoP. And so I always make sure that these guys know that we should not go out there and play any games. It’s just not worth it.
“We’ve seen them penalise people who are intentionally obscuring obscuring performance. And I feel like most of the adjustments they typically make on the BOP side are pretty fair. If you’re worried about controlling your pace. That’s just time and energy you’re not spending on actually getting ready for the race and, you know, preparing the crew and the car and everything else.”
We’re emerging from COVID – how has that impacted the team commercially?
“I think the biggest impact has been the energy at the track. If you’re going to try to bring guests and you know, for somebody to have a have a weekend at the track with their, with their partners or clients or whatever else. You can’t do that in an empty paddock.
“Our business, we have done okay, during the pandemic, not that we’ve made a ton of money or anything, but a lot of what we do is pretty insulated from more retail level fluctuations. So, we run our NSX programme, which is, for sure, our primary focus.
“It is the thing we want to grow the most and put the most energy into.
“We also almost entirely throughout COVID have been building Honda’s Civic Type R TC cars that race in the SRO Series.
“That business was unaffected by some races being cancelled things early on. We’ve been busy the whole time which is great.
“And then we also have some some customer stuff that we operate mostly Porsches. They do a bunch of club racing. So we have a group of cars that we maintain, and take to races and do track support and all that. And a lot of those events kept going on. They were just very restricted,. That group of customers, for the most part, are people that have been with been with me for many years. And so we didn’t have a lot of customer traffic drop off, because there’s just kind of the same thing we’ve been doing.”
You did have one fairly high-profile addition to your programmes through and beyond the pandemic, prepping and running the SunEnergy 1 AMG at the 2020 and 2021 Indy 8 Hours.
“I got started in racing, working on our Mazda factory Touring Car programme in 2003. That was kind of my first first real job in racing.
I worked on that programme for seven years. And my old boss there Craig Nagler from TriPoint is basically one of my one of my best friends, I still learn a lot from him. That was all pre-CJ Wilson Racing, pre-Gradient and everything else.
“I got to know a lot of people and, in 2007, I moved back home to Texas and opened my own shop and continued doing a lot of contract work for rac teams – a little bit of stuff in in World Challenge. ran one of the Speedsource RX8s as the crew chief for a year.
“We were doing a lot of customer stuff and CJ Wilson Racing began as they were a customer of my business. and after we ramped up all the stuff we were doing for them, CJ and I started operating as one company together.
“But throughout all of this I’ve tried to always position us and myself as available to do stuff, that we’re technically competent to go jump in and do things.
“In the Speedsource era when the diesel Mazda 6 (GX – Grand Am) cars were coming online, a few of us actually flew and worked there for a while just to help catch up on fabrication work and things like that.
“The SunEnergy thing came out of a similar relationship-building thing.
“It grew out of us racing against Multimatic in the GT4s which renewed an even earlier relationship after being assigned to share a pit box with them in Conti Challenge when I was racing the Mazdas. So we got to know those guys pretty well.”
“We started racing against them in GT4 when they’re running the Mustangs and we had Caymans. And it was a good, friendly rivalry, it came down, pretty much to us and them running up front most of the time, which was which a lot of fun.
“But once we got out of GT4 stuff, there was a couple of other times where we ended up doing contract work for Multimatic just helping them support a couple of random weekends where they had an extra car and they needed some extra people and we would go help them. We’ve always maintained a good relationship with them.
“And the Kenny (Habul) thing came about through contacts in that relationship.
“It was very short notice, we definitely had a pretty serious challenge to get everything organised in a short period of time but it was a fairly successful outing have that at the Indy 8 Hours.
“That first time, I think we ended up third in Pro-Am. But I think the biggest thing was just with the short notice, it all kind of ended up being fairly organised by time we got to race day, which is the biggest challenge there – and after that we were asked to do a lot more stuff.”
What does the road ahead offer? What do you think the options are for the team? Is it still firmly US based? We know that GT3 is coming to the fore – What’s next? Is Le Mans on the radar for the future?
“You’re gonna have to earn your way there. And that, for some people, and including us, may take years to figure out how to earn a spot.
DTM is a good example of that. Opening it to GT3 cars, all of a sudden means that basically anybody can be a DTM team. And so the same thing is gonna happen at Le Mans.
“There’s definitely a kind of a barrier there with the GTE cars, where you can’t just kind of spool up a GTE team. But you can spool up a GT3 team, OK with a lot of dollars but not the amount of dollars that is inaccessible to a lot of wealthy people.
“So I have no illusions that we’re gonna do a couple of couple of foundational seasons of IMSA and then all of a sudden go to go to Le Mans.
“I think the long term is that if you’re going to get to Le Mans, you need to really have a solid relationship with a manufacturer that shares that ambition.
“I know that Acura, for sure has ambitions to go to Le Mans. I think where that gets a little bit murky is with their GT3 platform.
“The NSX road car is out of out of production now and while HPD has made a very clear and solid commitment to support the race car beyond the conclusion of the road car production. But there’s always going to be some sunset to that. And so it needs a clear vision of what comes next.
“For us, we’ve spent a lot of time building a very warm and productive relationship with HPD on theAcura. And so my default on all fronts is to maintain that and that we would like to stay in an HPD product. What precisely that might look like a couple years out from now is difficult to say.”
There’s two options moving forward. One of which is GT3. The other one is prototypes. Is that something you’ve got a weather eye on? It’s clearly a growing market?
“We definitely are interested in doing prototype stuff. I think, for me, running a business, it’s just about figuring out what the potential model is for it. There’s a pretty big gulf between individuals that want to spend money to go run the race and a P2 car that has no association with the manufacturer, and doing anything that’s supported by a manufacturer. That’s a huge gap. And it’s going to remain huge in the hypercar era.
“We’d like to do some prototype racing, I think that the most likely place for that at the moment would be in something like a P2 car.
“But you have to sort of be willing to be divorced from any relationship with a manufacturer to go in that direction. And that’s one appealing thing about GT3 racing. Not that we’re getting funded by Honda or Acura to race what we’re doing now. But the ability to lean on their PR machine, the ability to lean on their dealer network to try to find outlets for partners you have and all those things are all benefits of doing something where there’s a manufacturer involved, even if they’re not paying you.
“I think that when you go into this kind of brand agnostic prototype racing, you have to be mentally prepared that that is just a customer service operation. And so the the dollars for that are purely gonna have to come from a customer. I don’t think that there’s that many people selling genuine sponsorship on, on programme, prototype racing that has no manufacturer associated with it.”
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