Robertson Racing's Ford GT-R has come a long way since its hurried debut at Sebring. (Photo: Marshall Pruett) » More Photos

Flying Solo

Emails have been coming in all year long asking about the development of the Ford GT-R, so I sat down with Robertson Racing’s engineer Andy "H" Smith and driver David Murry to learn about the car’s progress from Sebring up through this weekend at Elkhart Lake.

Their GT-R, built by Doran Racing, has been the responsibility of “H” and the Robertson team to develop and improve on their own. To help get the first chassis ready, H was active in creating the car they now race.

“When we started with the car, it was obviously very late in getting to us. And I don't know what you know about the fact that I actually had to go there and spend an awful lot of time in designing a lot of our own car. I was there for 2 - 1/2 months. Everything that we've done with the car I'm really pleased with because the car went straight to Sebring and we ran 9 - 1/2 hours of its debut race.

“So from a reliability point of view, on the whole, the major stuff, we've been really good with the car; it's been really a lot reliable. We’ve had a battery lead issue, alternator issue; all sorts of things that you would find with a new car. Okay, the alternator overheated and burned all of the installation out of the coil, so the alternator failed. The wire, it was probably just strapped into the car wrong and it just fatigued and broke. So we had two races with issues. Any new car you're going to find that sort of stuff. But, you know, it seems like it's a real pain and we've had these problems but, on the whole, for a brand new car, it’s pretty good. The car, on the whole, I like.”

For Murry, the GT-R was a pleasant surprise at Sebring. “The Ford GT was good to drive right off the truck. It was delivered to us at Sebring Raceway the Saturday before the Sebring race. Reliability was good. The speed was about 4 seconds off the pole time. We were severely underpowered however. We couldn't even come close to running with anyone on power. It was difficult to evaluate the handling since we couldn't stay with anyone on the straights. We just wanted to be in the same zip code as the other cars.”

Even with a Roush-Yates-built Ford V8 engine, the team still needs more power to keep up with the class leading entries from Ferrari and Porsche. (Photo: Marshall Pruett) » More Photos

“H” echoes Murry’s assessment. “We're still short of power and we keep trying to lobby IMSA for more power, bigger restrictors basically, because we’re not getting it -- we've got some steps forward out of Yates, Roush-Yates, but not enough. So we feel that we would like a little bit of restrictor, if we can get it. And we’re still lobbying for that.”

After honing in on improving the Ford’s suspension, aerodynamic development has become their greatest focus over the last few races. “And we are now working on aero. We have done an awful lot of stuff -- with damper stuff; we went to a shaker rig and we've done damper stuff and we've learned an awful lot; that basically where we started with the dampers was just in the wrong place completely. So we've made steps in the right direction in there; the car responds a lot better on the track. But in the meantime, we’re working on downforce. You know, we put a diffuser on the back of the car that it didn't come with one; so we made our own diffuser. That made a lot of difference; it meant that we basically took wing out of it. So, we know that we made big gains with the diffuser. We have worked on the splitter. Not so much the splitter but dive planes in the front splitter area. It's got an awful lot of overhanging and there's a massive splitter out there that's within the profile, within the writing of the rules but it still wasn't sufficient to cope with what we could get out of the back of the car. So we've ran a set of dive planes first at Lime Rock, which got smashed before I ever had even made molds for them!

“So we then made another set in the week between and put them on and ran them at Mid-Ohio and that was good. It was definitely better than what we had. We've now, in the last couple of weeks, other than the massive amount of repair work we had to do just to recover the spares from the shunt at Lime Rock, we have made double dive planes for each front corner of the car. So now we have an option that we could have a little bit of dive plane or double it up or go away from it. Now, we're pretty sure that we need as much as we can get at the front.”

Fabricating dive planes and a diffuser now give him something he’s lacked all season: multiple choices to alter the car’s aerodynamic characteristics. “We had no tuning options. None. It was a case of, “This is the car: let’s go run it and see where we can get to.”

ALMS ace David Murry has been instrumental in the evolution and improvement of the GT-R package. (Photo: Courtesy of Robertson Racing) » More Photos

Murry’s had an odd complaint about the car—although it’s a few seconds shy of the leading Porsche’s and Ferrari’s, it doesn’t possess any overly negative driving traits. It has made improving the car more challenging.

“The hard part of developing this car is that it doesn't do anything bad. It is fun to drive and not hard to use. It just isn't as fast as the front runners. There is nothing glaring at us saying this is what we need to do. This year is particularly difficult to get to the front because you have Porsche and Ferrari trying to beat each other and are continuing to develop their cars. We may make some gains but they do too so the gap doesn't close from us to them as much as we would like. That said, our Ford GT-R seems to have more overall grip, more power, and puts that power down better. We qualified 4.4 seconds off pole at Sebring and at Mid Ohio qualified 3.1 seconds off. We are making progress but it's slow, just as the GT40 years ago did.”

Even if major complaints have been few and far between from inside the cockpit, “H” has still been able to work down a few paths of improvement on his own. “We're trying whatever we can to get the thing to carry a bit more speed through the corners. Handling wise, it's not too bad. Maybe we can do more work with that. There’s still areas that we can go to, to mess with. We can mess with the rake; we haven’t done too much messing with the rake of the car yet. You know, the splitter angle in relation to the flat bottom of the car and stuff. But at the moment, we’re just working on the easier pieces to get to. And then given more time I think we’ll be able to progress further with it.”

The final area Robertson Racing has concentrated on is optimized weight distribution, but with a car that’s already so tightly packaged, only minor refinements are to be had right now.

The recent addition of double dive planes to the front of the car has given the team a greater range of aerodynamic adjustability. (Photo: Marshall Pruett) » More Photos

“When the car was originally built, it was very light; it was way under the weight. So we had to put the ballast in. As we've added more stuff to the car, electrical equipment and different sensors and stuff like that, obviously you keep adding to the weight of the car. We’ve added a Cool Suit box -- even though the car has AC, I'm still working on improving the AC system. I want it to work better so I can maybe get rid of the Cool Box, which is a big weight saver. There’s two gallons of water in there. So I'd like to get rid of that system; it’d probably save me 20 pounds with all the equipment and the two gallons of water. But we're back now to, we've got a weight break from IMSA as first concession for performance leveling. We're down to 1200 kilos so that was obviously good for us. We liked that but we’re now… I've got to the point where we've got no ballast on the car but with the extra components I’ve mentioned we may be a little bit high now. So I don't know how we're going to creep back down again but it’s another task to manage.”

The team has its work cut out for them, but the ever-positive Robertson Racing have high hopes for the future of the program. One of the biggest cheerleaders can be found with David Murry. “Taking advantage of Dick Barbour's team with "H" at the helm I hope we can make some significant improvements this winter during our break from races. I would realistically think 2009 may be a chance to get close to the podium.”

“H” is a bit more measured in his outlook, but it’s only because he knows how much work his small team has in store to make the Ford a threat in the American Le Mans Series. For them, the future is now. “I have some ideas but we'll see what this latest one does for us this weekend and then we'll move on from there. But obviously, now for the next three races we’re stuck with what we've got. We’re not going to develop anything on the road. We’re five strong in the shop most of the time and everybody's here on the track so there's no development going on in the background like maybe Porsche or Ferrari or Corvette-type people are going to be doing; people always at the background developing stuff even when they're away racing. So we'll go with what we've got now. We'll run these next three races and then maybe for Petit we’ll look at our next change of front downforce to see what we can get.”