Gavin: GTLM is wide open

Corvette Racing’s Oliver Gavin has declared that the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona will be anybody’s game after an inconclusive Roar Before the 24 test in which nobody was prepared to show their hand.

Aside from a small fire which cut short their running on the first day, the Roar went as planned for the no. 4 C7.R shared by Gavin, Tommy Milner and on-loan Audi LMP1 racer Marcel Fassler, making his first appearance at the Speedway. 

However, Corvette stalwart Gavin, who took his fifth victory at the Le Mans 24 Hours last June, isn’t taking anything for granted in the marque's pursuit of back-to-back class victories at Daytona, with the Balance of Performance (BOP) at the forefront of everybody's minds.

"Everybody is very cagey about the BOP" says Gavin (Richard Prince).

“It’s very hard to know what everybody was doing,” Gavin said at the Autosport Show. “It would seem that in every session there was a pattern where whoever was out first on a decent set of tyres would set the laptime, then everyone would drive up to that laptime and sit there right behind it, within a tenth or half a tenth of that original time and never wanted to go any faster.

“Everybody is very cagey about the BOP and in the past people have got very badly bitten by it. Last year we got absolutely murdered with it and in the second half of the year we couldn’t get anywhere near the Porsche. I don’t know why that was, but Porsche had everything they needed to compete and they came away winning the championship.

“You realise there’s going to have to be some more of that coming for this year and you’re wondering who is going to be the chosen one for 2016. It’s one of the necessary evils of sportscar racing at the moment – it’s frustrating but we’ll just have to see how the BOP plays out for everybody involved. It’s anybody’s game.”