It’s
easy to imagine that you’re talking with someone much older than his years when
in the company of Andrew Palmer. Despite his relatively limited experience,
having only made his car racing debut at the 2013 Lamborghini Super Trofeo
World Final at Vallelunga (incidentally, he won it), the Californian
21-year-old has quickly established himself as one of America’s brightest young
talents, winning a race and finishing fifth overall in the 2014 Pirelli World
Challenge before making the leap across the Atlantic as part of Lamborghini’s
factory roster in the Blancpain Endurance Series for 2015, where he won first
time out at Monza.
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| Palmer has impressed in his first season in Europe with Lamborghini (Xynamic). |
Next
up is this weekend’s Petit Le Mans, which could see Palmer complete a
remarkable season by sealing the North American Endurance Cup, having won both the
season opening Daytona 24 and Sebring 12 Hours – his first experience of
driving a prototype – before adding a second at the 6 Hours of Watkins Glen in
the no. 52 PR1/Mathiasen Motorsports LMPC
he shares with Mike Guasch and Tom Kimber-Smith. Although the CORE Autosport
machine shared by Colin Braun, Jon Bennett and James Gue enjoy a commanding 12
point advantage over Guasch and Kimber-Smith in the regular points after
victory at COTA, they must overturn a three-point deficit to add the Endurance
Cup, with a possible 15 points available over the 10 hours.
“We’ll try to close it out at
Atlanta but it will be really tough, so we can only hope for the best and just
keep doing what we’ve been doing the whole season,” Palmer said. “The US has
been really good to me this season – the whole deal only came together at the
last minute, about two weeks before Daytona happened, so to win both [Daytona
and Sebring] was really awesome. We rode that high into Monza and after getting
the win there I was just pinching myself, thinking ‘what’s going on? Why are we
winning so much?’ That’s a good problem to have I guess!”
There isn’t much comparable
between the Chevrolet V8-powered Oreca FLM09 and GT3-spec Lamborghini Huracan,
but Palmer believes the experience of driving both – in addition to learning
the European circuits for the first time – will ultimately prove beneficial to
his development.
“At the end of the day, they all
have a steering wheel, a gas pedal and four wheels on the road, so there are
definitely transferrable skills from one car to the other,” he says. “I love
the prototype but I also really love the Lambo; I’m still a student at
university and that’s like the ultimate ice-breaker into a conversation,
although I try not to mention it straight away! Of course all the cars over
here are fantastic to drive, but somehow it doesn’t carry as much weight as
saying ‘I race for Lamborghini’ because it’s such a recognisable brand.
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| Palmer believes GT cars are reaching prototype levels of development (Xynamic). |
“I think we’re seeing more and
more GT cars approaching prototype levels of development, whether it be the
chassis, the aero components – this car has been in the wind tunnel for hours
and hours at Dallara – so every car you drive teaches you something new. The
level of technology that every type of class is using is stepping up, so it’s
really helpful to run both classes. It’s cool to walk both worlds, not too
Americans get to do that, so it’s fun to fly the Stars and Stripes over here.”
The ultimate dream however,
remains the Le Mans 24 Hours, a race Palmer admits to having watched since
childhood. With the Lamborghini not homologated for Le Mans, Palmer’s route to
La Sarthe is as yet unclear, but he’s optimistic that 2016 will present an
opportunity of some form.
“I think probably starting when I
was ten, we always had it on in the house and the same with Daytona, so it was
great to go to this big event I had been a fan of as a child and win," he says. "I would love
to have the same feeling at Le Mans, but I’m not sure exactly what route we’re
going to take to get there.
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