This weekend is a significant one for TF Sport, representing Corvette on home soil at Lone Star Le Mans in the WEC’s first race at Circuit of The Americas since 2020.
Up front in the LMGT3 class, it’s a three-way battle for the lead of the championship, with Manthey’s pair of Porsche sitting 1-2 in the standings and the No. 92 from Pure Rxcing holding a commanding 25-point lead after another win in São Paulo.
But the expectation is that this weekend’s six-hour race in the Texas sunshine will not be a walk in the park for either of the two 911s, or the title-contending No. 31 WRT BMW M4 LMGT3. There’s a lack of circuit knowledge to content with, success ballast to factor in and tweaks to the Balance of Performance, which should see the field tighten. The COTA circuit has also been resurfaced over the summer, making the weekend’s action a challenge for everyone.
While the title battle is in full focus with the season beginning to come to a close, there are plenty of additional storylines to follow in the category. With each passing race meeting it’s becoming more hotly contested as the teams new to the WEC and those racing with new cars grow into the season. There’s a not-so-orderly queue of teams now desperate to score a first win before the end of the season.
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One of these is TF, which has endured a challenging run through the first five races. The transition from Aston Martin to Chevrolet and the task of competing with a brand-new GT3 car was never going to be a walk in the park, but Tom Ferrier’s crew have stuck at it, balancing the team’s flagship WEC GT3 program with its European Le Mans Series and Asian Le Mans Series commitments.
“Everyone comes here happy and energized after a bit of a summer break,” Ferrier told RACER. “It’s been really hard this year. We do the same programs every year it feels like, but this time Asian Le Mans rolled straight into the additional WEC race at Qatar and the Prologue, which meant four weeks back to back, and in ELMS there was a doubleheader last year, so it’s been the same program but with more races. We’ve also done a lot more testing this year to get our heads around the Corvette.”
So far this year TF has a best finish of seventh at Imola with the No. 81 car of Tom van Rompuy, Charlie Eastwood and Rui Andrade. But Ferrier doesn’t feel that reflects the team’s progress. Regardless, priority one for this season was simply learning the ins and outs of the new car and building its relationship with GM and Pratt Miller.
“We’re taking steps forward,” Ferrier said. “We haven’t shown that in actual results, but in Brazil, for instance, we should have been P4 had we not had a drive-through, and that would have been a good result for us. We just need a big result on the board, and we hope here is where things change. Too often we’ve had flawless runs in practice and qualifying, then had issues in the race.
“You always have high hopes, and when we started off with pole in Qatar we thought, ‘Wow!’But we said going in, getting a podium in year one would make us happy and we wanted to be fighting for that at the end of the year. We never thought we’d come straight in and have it easy.
“The whole torque sensor addition for the class (for BoP purposes), for instance, has been tricky and created a lot of work. We felt like we were playing catch-up early on because some factories in the class had a bit of a head start with it (through parallel Hypercar programs which have been utilizing the devices since the category’s debut).
“The virtual energy aspect has really changed the in-race strategy too, because the stints are shorter, we are doing more stops and in WEC tire allocation is limited, so you have to be careful and experiment. But we are in a good place now.”
Behind the scenes, work has been ongoing throughout the season to improve the Z06 LMGT3.R, whether that be via updates to improve the car’s software and reliability, or via shared experiences with other Corvette customer teams.
Corvette Racing has been tactical at this early stage, providing a restricted number of customer cars for a set of teams who all compete in separate championships. By not pitting customers against each other, it enables them to have an open relationship.
“We’ve been doing group Zoom calls with Pratt Miller, AWA and DXDT between races, where we share information and discuss any issues we have,” Ferrier said. “That’s been so helpful at this stage.
“It makes for a really nice product. Pratt Miller and GM do so much in the background and that’s made it very positive in year one because we have had reliability issues and blind spots. But we’ve been working through it, every weekend the car receives updates and that’s been massive.”
This is just the beginning of what TF Sport hopes will be a long-term, successful partnership with GM. Plans for an expansion of its effort with Corvette are afoot following the delivery of a third chassis in June ahead of Le Mans. This third car will not only act as a test chassis going forward, it will likely be used for race programs outside of the WEC.
For starters, Ferrier hopes to use it in the Asian Le Mans Series over the winter, so he can compete for an automatic invitation to the Le Mans 24 Hours via success in the GT3 class that would guarantee a third Corvette on the grid for the biggest race of the year. Taking it to the ELMS for the first time in 2025 is also a possibility.
“It would mean more learning on the Goodyear tires and the torque sensors if we take the car to ELMS, which would boost our WEC program,” Ferrier explained.
Could appearances in IMSA to bolster GM’s presence at the big Floridian endurance races be on the cards?
“I’d like to, but probably not next year as we are focused on getting the WEC program right first,” he said. “Never say never though!”