One of the biggest pieces of news heading into the 2020 racing season was the introduction of the mid-engine Corvette C8.R for competition in IMSA and WEC.
The car made its racing debut during the season-opening Rolex 24 At Daytona, and also took part in the WEC-sanctioned 6 Hours of COTA at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin in late February.

Since then, the car and the rest of the racing world have taken an unplanned hiatus. However, we were recently able to catch up with Corvette Racing Team Manager Ben Johnson to talk about the development of the car, what his team has learned so far, & its plans for the future.
A mechanical engineer, Johnson has been in the role since 2016 and has worked with various road racing projects for Pratt & Miller for twelve years. Clearly, he is an authority on the subject.

The BLOCK: How different is setting up this car to go to the racetrack with the mid-engine layout as opposed to the traditional under-the-hood version from the C7.R or every iteration until now?

Ben Johnson: In every iteration from C5.R up to the second version of C7.R there have been advancements in technology, both on the cars and in setup technology.
But ultimately it was a similar architecture and a similar aero philosophy, so you built a deep playbook across all the different generations.

Now C8.R is a fresh start with different architecture.
The center-mounted engine opens up quite a bit in terms of what you can do with aerodynamics, especially at the front of the car. So we took a clean-sheet design approach when we were developing the car.
During the development, we began to rebuild the setup playbook, so when we did go to the track, we started with baseline setups that we were confident in. From there you start to develop,

“What is the car sensitive to?”

Whatever the drivers key in on in terms of feedback, we use the tools & methods that we developed over the last decade, but apply that to new input variables from C8.R.
It is a different animal to set up for sure. You wouldn’t take a C7.R setup and put it on C8.R & expect good results. But we are able to take a similar philosophy and apply it.

The BLOCK: I know you’ve only run two races with that car, but when you’re at the track within a race weekend, be it in the paddock or on pit stops, is the approach any different or does that routine remain the same?

BJ: In the paddock there is a different methodology to setting up the car now. Where we used to use wheels and tires, now we use what are called setup fixtures. These are solid, aluminum setup wheels that replace the wheel and tire which allow us a quicker and more precise setup process.
That eventually saves time and gives us more opportunity to make changes and process data.
There is a learning curve but [this process is] focused on increasing efficiency as the end result.

In the pit lane, some things that were difficult on C7.R are more straightforward on C8.R and vice versa. The packaging of the cars always tends to get more complex, more dense towards the center of gravity of the car. Each generation they get slightly more difficult to work on because there are advantages to having very tight packaging.
So it’s a learning curve there, and you get a little bit of grumbling from [the mechanics working on the car], but everyone understands that it’s for the best in terms of performance.

Then there’s the learning curve as well for everybody over the wall to understand, “How do I do wheel changes faster and faster than I did on C7.R, get the driver in and out, and fuel the car?”
Fundamentally they are very similar systems from C7.R to C8.R, but just the shape of the bodywork and changes to the suspension creates an opportunity for the mechanics to refine how they are working over the wall.

It's effectively all muscle memory at the end of the day and they work to reset and get back to where they were on C7.R.

The BLOCK: You touched on this a little bit, but are there any specific benefits, or one major benefit, that you’ve found thus far from this new layout when you’ve been able to race those couple times?

BJ: We recognized very early on that the aero packaging on the car was going to be more open. That’s somewhere where the regulations allow you, within very strict parameters, to be creative and come up with a package that’s unique to your car and hopefully give you an advantage over the competition.
With C7.R we knew that we were limited because of engine and rear sub-frame placement.
Therefore, with C8.R we made an effort early on to say, “Let’s open that up as much as we can,” to utilize all of the aero benefits that are available on the car.

The second one was the weight distribution, which is fairly obvious with the engine placement change, but it puts the operating window of the car much more similar to our competition. Our goal is to have better performance on average across the range of at all the tracks we race at in IMSA and the FIA.
With C7.R you knew some places the car was going to operate very well, and those were kind of “your tracks,” & other places you knew that it was a damage control situation because of the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the car.

The BLOCK: On the flip side of that, it sounds like that you knew what some of the challenges would be going into the year. Is there anything you found at Daytona or Austin that was kind of a surprising challenge or something you didn’t expect that you had to work out?

BJ: The new car shares very few parts with C7.R or any previous car.
So we’re continually learning. You do as much testing as you can during development, but you don’t fully understand it until you’ve completed 24 hours of hard-nosed competition.
We learned what the car does when components are run sustained for 24 hours, at elevated temperature and duty cycle, and with the drivers at ten-tenths because they’re in competitive mode versus test and development mode.

To finish the first race on the lead lap with the No. 3 car was a really positive outcome and to have performance in line with our competition was also positive. The series did a good job of evaluating the data and setting the BoP (Balance of Performance) for a fair fight.
We took that batch of lessons and we went to Austin.
Unfortunately, there we were limited by the initial BoP from the WEC, but that’s an evolving process, and I think at Sebring we would have been much closer.

The BLOCK: You mentioned how much the C7 to C8 race car has changed, and of course the street car has changed significantly as well. A Chevrolet Performance website says the C8.R shares 80 structural parts with the 2020 Stingray. How closely were you aligned with the street vehicle engineering team when you developed the race car?

BJ: Every generation of the car the integration between the production and race programs have become more aligned. C5.R was developed after the street car was in production, C6 had some tweaks to the production car based on what was learned in racing, and C7 demonstrated the potential of co-development in terms of aerodynamics and what was brought forward from the race program to the production car. C8.R being a clean sheet design for both of our groups, we were involved early on with the production team.

In addition to giving some guidance and suggestions where it was applicable, we knew very early on the key architectures and design choices the production team was making and were able to roll that into our simulation and packaging studies.

That gave us a significant step forward during the design phase that we were able to incorporate updates in near real time This is the ideal process as it allows for both the production and race car to be designed simultaneously and apply learning in both directions.

The BLOCK: So right from the beginning on this one you were fairly aligned and knew what that side was doing.

BJ: Exactly. They’re a great group to work with. They’re passionate about racing and we know that the race car can only be as good as the production car allows.
You have to use so much of the production geometries and architecture, and even parts. That whole team over there has to be giving 110% effort to produce a car that can be turned into a successful race car.

The BLOCK: Once we get racing again, which hopefully will be sooner than later, is your goal to go out and compete for wins with this car right away, or do you have benchmarks and milestones?
Maybe you are looking for a podium at Watkins Glen and then maybe look to get a win at Atlanta. How are you approaching this year?

BJ: We think that with what we’ve learned of the car and the testing we’ve done even since Daytona and Austin that we are going to be in a position to win races when the opportunity is there. As long as the performance is aligned between all of the different manufacturers, we have as good a chance as anybody else.
So internally our mode has gone from, “This is a new car, we’ve got to develop it,” to “All right, let’s start executing this the same way we would C7.” We know that if we do our job as well or better than everybody else on pit lane we have just as good a chance of winning.

So now the focus is on the championship. Ultimately we’ve proven that you don’t have to win a race to win the championship, but we certainly want to win a couple along the way here and be successful in total in 2020.

The BLOCK: So you went from R&D mode to race-winning and championship mode pretty quickly it sounds like.

BJ: For sure. I know we’ll learn a few more things along the way with how new the car is, but you’ve got to get yourself in winning and championship mode very quickly because that’s the same mode that everybody else is in.


Team ZR-1
True Custom Performance Tuning
Teamzr1.com