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[h=2]PWC: GAINSCO team meets its new Porsche[/h] Richard S. James (words & images)

GAINSCO /Bob Stallings Racing team members spent a couple weeks at Porsche Motorsport North America building their new 911 GT3R racer.

As Pirelli World Challenge, and racing in general, has evolved form do-it-yourself racecars into off-the-shelf homologated machinery, one of the things that has been lost is an intimate knowledge of the car, the familiarity that comes with stripping a car down to its bare bones and rebuilding it into something more suitable for competition. While teams will often tear down and put together a GT3 car so they have that knowledge, it's not always a possibility. Being able to take part in assembling a car from the basic chassis adds that familiarity that is often missing.


The GAINSCO/Bob Stallings Racing team recently had that opportunity at Porsche Motorsports North America's new facility connected to the Porsche Experience Center in Carson, Calif. The team is making the switch from McLaren to Porsche, and was able to spend a couple of weeks in Southern California assembling its new 911 GT3R that it will campaign in Pirelli World Challenge in 2017.
"Usually our cars are completed in Germany, they're test driven in Germany, then they come over and are delivered to the team," explains Jens Walther, president and CEO of Porsche Motorsports North America. "The team takes possession of the car, starts preparing the car. By that, they take the car partially apart and then put it together to learn a little bit about the car. Here, to build the car into a new body shell in partnership with our team here helped them to understand the car a lot better right form the beginning. You get really deep into the basics of the car. That's what we've been doing here, and it's been working out quite well."
When the team announced its switch from McLaren to Porsche a few weeks ago, team principal Bob Stallings said that switching from the McLaren 650S was less about that car – indeed, driver Jon Fogarty and technical director John Ward had come to grips with the car as shown in solid results toward the end of the season, but was, "More of a long-term strategy with Porsche. We just think for the longer term, we're better off with Porsche."
And that starts with getting to know the people at Porsche Motorsports North America as well as the car, which the exercise of spending a couple weeks at their facility enabled.
"This is a unique experience," says Ward. "Me, the mechanics and everybody, we get to start from the ground up. We already feel we know a lot about this car, and we haven't even run it yet. I'm grateful to PMNA for letting us do it this way.
"It's going to be valuable because we are here with the technical staff of Porsche Motorsports and the engineers, so I'm getting an education that way, learning what they know about the car and what we need to know to shorten our leaning curve a little bit. It's still going to be down to testing – lots and lots of testing – but being on a first-name basis with all the boys here, I can pick up the phone and know who's on the other end of the line," Ward adds.
"It's a nice project for us," says Nick Lester, PMNA's customer support manager. "It's been good to have the guys here, because it helped them form relationships with the Porsche team – everybody, from the parts department to the administration."
Porsche also enlisted the help of Dave Gahagan, who started the year with Effort Racing – which included an emergency rebuild between COTA and St. Petersburg after Patrick Long's big shunt in race 2 in Austin – and also worked with Calvert Dynamics team when Michael Lewis ran a couple of events with them. Lester notes that Gahagan has a lot of expertise with Porsche racecars and was a big help in the process.
After assembling the car, rolling it out of the PMNA shop past a 962, a 959 rally car and a 919 and firing it up for the first time, along with a pre-Christmas shakedown at Willow Springs International Raceway, the team came away with a pretty favorable impression of the 911 GT3R.
"We like the straighforwardness of the car," says Ward. "Nothing about it is unnecessarily complicated. We like that a lot. That's kind of what a racecar should be. It needs to be simple, straightforward, reliable."
"We had [Porsche factory driver] Pat Long here, and he ran the first few laps to make sure everything is as it should be," said Fogarty after the initial shakedown. "I jumped in and ran a handful of laps to get a feel. I immediately felt at home. My first GT experience came in a 911 and I've done other Cup races, 25 Hours of Thunderhill...I've spent quite a bit of time in a Porsche, and it felt very much like I expected. I think I'm going to like it."
The whole program of having the team encamp at Porsche Motorsports North America for a couple of weeks is an opportunity that would likely have not been possible at PMNA's old facility down the freeway in Santa Ana, Calif. But with its new home at the Porsche Experience Center, PMNA has plenty of room and the right facilities to make it happen. The cool part is that visitors to the Experience Center could look through the big windows that face the lobby, right past the RS Spyder and see the team working on the car.
"Our new facility here is fantastic," says Lester, standing in front of a Porsche 962 tub that's undergoing restoration, a former Mario and Michael Andretti car. "We've got the space, we've got the equipment. Porsche Motorsports North America is a service facility, so we look after all the customer motorsports programs in North America, from parts sales to track support to engine and transmission service. We also do vehicle restorations and we do some special projects."