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“We were laughing at ourselves when they were changing the transmission because the goal was only to finish, and then after the first laps on track, we thought ‘Maybe there’s more for us’ and over the course of the week, we started the race with the desire to win the GT race.īut the bond that had grown during the project and the pride from what NASCAR accomplished was what caught Johnson’s emotions. “We’re not the same category, but we are the same type of car, and our own estimations we thought we’d be mid-to-back pack of the GT cars and you use that for motivation,” Johnson said. Johnson couldn’t help but be disappointed.

A later stop to change the gearbox dropped the NASCAR effort to a 39th-place overall finish, but 10th in the GTE class. Two late mechanical problems - first the car had to make an unplanned stop to change the brakes with about five hours remaining - took the Camaro out of contention to beat the GTE class. “That class, leading those guys, there were some puckered up Porsches and Corvettes,” Hendrick said. Hendrick said he watched the race until 3 a.m., and when he checked his phone when he woke up Sunday morning, thought “holy cow, we can win the GT class!” Suddenly, the Hendrick team began fantasizing about beating some GTE cars.Īnd when it found itself with an actual chance to win the entire class, well, expectations changed. It called for an adjustment of goals, especially when race organizers decided the Garage 56 entry would not start last and moved to 39th, ahead of all the GTE cars because of the speed discrepancy. It was also much faster than anyone expected.Īnd after Hendrick Motorsports’ pit crew won its class in the pit crew competition - finishing fifth overall - Rockenfeller qualified the car more than three seconds faster than the entire 21-car GTE AM class. The major differences in the Le Mans entry were that it was about 500 pounds (226 kg) lighter than the Cup car, had a larger fuel cell by roughly 12 gallons (45 liters) because of the length of the 8.467-mile (13.626 km) track, carbon brake discs and a Goodyear tire designed specifically for the race. Although the systems and components on the Le Mans model are similar to the Next Gen car, the Le Mans version had functioning headlights and taillights. The lineup of Johnson, 2009 Formula One champion Jenson Button and two-time Le Mans winner Mike Rockenfeller arrived in France after more than a year of testing Garage 56 hoping only to finish the race.īut Knaus had pushed the Next Gen to its limits and the final product was heavily modified from what is currently being used in the Cup Series. Hendrick tasked Chad Knaus, winner of seven Cup championships with Johnson, to run the project and told him to spare no expense. “I hope my dad and my brother are somewhere up there looking down and smiling, but the goal when we set out was to try and finish the race running at the end and not be last. And then the way the team and the pit crews and everybody performed all week, it was just fantastic,” France said. “That was thousands of hours of hard work by hundreds of people that went into making this thing happen.

“The last thing we were going to do was come here and fall on our nose.” “I wasn’t going to let that happen,” Rick Hendrick told The Associated Press.

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To complete the family dream, France wanted to ensure he had the partners to put forth a top-notch effort that wouldn’t embarrass the racing series that got its start beach racing in Daytona, Florida, and found that North Carolina moonshine runners were its earliest stars.

His father twice brought NASCAR to Le Mans but failed to come close to finishing the race. It was a passion project for France, who first attended Le Mans in 1962 with his father, the late NASCAR founder Bill France Sr.