senor honda

[h=2]RealTime Acura NSX team reveals PWC GT cars[/h] By Richard S. James / Images courtesy of Acura & PWC

One of the advantages of using the GT3 platform as the basis for Pirelli World Challenge GT is that there is some stability. Much of the grid will look very similar to last year, new liveries aside. There will, however, be a few new cars on the grid, notably the Acura NSX GT3 in the hands of RealTime drivers Ryan Eversley and Peter Cox and CRP Racing's new Mercedes AMG GT3, driven by Ryan Dalziel. 2017 will also see the debut of the Ferrari 488 GT3 by R.Ferri Motorsport.
RealTime's switch to the NSX from the TLX GT means that, for the first time, World Challenge GT is all GT3, with no more legacy cars. Fully homologated for GT3, the NSX is also being run by Michael Shank Racing in IMSA's Weathertech SportsCar Championship. The car has been in development since 2015 and actually made its competition debut at the Mid-Ohio rounds last August and then in SprintX at Utah Motorsports Campus. Between that, a solid showing at the Rolex 24 at Daytona and all the testing, the car should be well sorted by the time the first practice session begins at St. Petersburg next Thursday.
"We've got some good experience with the car, and certainly more to learn as we go," says team principal Peter Cunningham who, after setting many World Challenge records that will be long unbroken, is stepping aside from driving to concentrate on running the team. "We've been very pleased, throughout the development phase, with how it reacted to changes and we've been pleased with its record of reliability."
Cunningham says that between the competition rounds RealTime entered last year with the NSX and the Rolex 24, the team has a pretty good understanding of where the car sits competitively, but acknowledges they don't yet know what role Balance of Performance will play and how the track-specific formulas will affect the car. But he does think that there's one area where the car seems to do well.
"I think the car looked very good in the wet at Daytona. We have a couple of drivers who like racing in the rain, and I don't see why, on a rainy day, our cars couldn't look good in the wet in Pirelli World Challenge," he says.
Two years ago Eversley took the first pole for the TLX GT in the rain at St. Petersburg before driving to victory the next day in the sunshine.
The joint effort of RealTime and Michael Shank Racing marks the first time Acura has competed with a production-based car at both of the top levels of American sports car racing, and while there is certainly crossover, it puts the car in front of different audiences.
"I think that Acura and Honda Performance Development wanted to compete in both series to showcase the strengths of the NSX GT3 in both the sprint and the endurance format, with the mindset of selling customer cars in the future," Cunningham explains. "I think an easy argument on why we like Pirelli World Challenge is that we've got a lot of fantastic venues, half the time with the Verizon IndyCar Series in front of some great audiences. When you win a race in World Challenge, you're winning overall. I think that's a big attraction."
CRP Racing doesn't have RealTime's longevity in World Challenge, but it has been in the series for a while with good results. The team came darn close to winning a championship in 2014 with Mike Skeen and Audi. For this season, it teams up with the driver who would have won the 2015 title had he not had to miss three races due to conflicts, Ryan Dalziel, with a new Mercedes AMG GT3.
Dalziel returns to the series with no scheduling issues, such as the World Endurance Championship races that interfered with him claiming the championship at Effort Racing. He says he's glad to be back in Pirelli World Challenge, and happy for this particular opportunity.
"There were a number of deals that were kind of flowing around," Dalziel explains of how it all came together. "I always admired CRP – I remember how tough they were in 2013 and '14. My engineer at Effort was good friends with [team owner Nicholas Short]. Throughout that season with Effort, we kind of shared a little information – let's say the two single-car teams were helping each other out the best they could. So I was excited about the team. Nick asked which car I wanted. To me, it didn't matter. There were three or four cars on the table, but I left it up to him."
CRP went with the Mercedes AMG. Like the Acura, the Mercedes AMG made its U.S. competition debut at the Rolex 24 with Riley Autosport, where it scored a third-place finish in GTD. There will be a couple of other Mercedes AMGs in World Challenge, notably in GTA with Tim Pappas and Black Swan Racing, which ran the previous iteration of the Mercedes, the SLS, in prior years. DXDT Racing is also expected to enter the SprintX rounds. But CRP is alone in running the car in GT for the full season. Fortunately they'll have some help and the experience of other teams in other series.
"We've had a lot of help from AMG so far. I feel like whatever they give us out of the box is going to be pretty close; then it's juts dial it in for U.S. tracks. It was good that Riley got to run their cars at Daytona and they'll share some information on that. I feel pretty confident that the car is going to be good," Dalziel says.
The team had a test session at Sebring, and Dalziel admits it took some getting used to; he hasn't driven a front-engine car since he last raced a Viper in ALMS in 2013. The team hopes to get one more run in before unloading at St. Petersburg next week.