Corvette Racing Drivers Praise Progress With Z06 GT3.R One Year In

The 2024 sportscar endurance racing season marked the first for the Corvette Z06 GT3.R – and represented a massive shift for Corvette Racing as a whole. Ditching its factory-backed racing efforts, General Motors focused on a customer racing program with the new Vette racer. Understandably, that meant there was a pretty sharp learning curve for the Vette teams, but they’ve learned quite a bit from the race car’s maiden season.

Antonio Garcia, who drives the No. 3 Corvette in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, weighed in on his team’s progress with the Vette Z06 GT3.R. He says that the 2024 season allowed him and his team to get a good feel for the race car, along with time spent in the simulator off the track – all valuable lessons that will help them in the 12 Hours of Sebring on March 15^th, 2025.

“We have another year of experience this year with this car. Last year even if the car felt pretty decent, we found a few other things over the course of the season and at Daytona [for the 2025 Rolex 24],” Garcia said in a press release. “We didn’t get to test [at the sanctioned test] but the AWA [fellow Corvette team] guys were there and we have their data to see. That will help the whole Corvette development program.”

Garcia added, “Some of our guys also have been going to the simulator. I hope we’ll have a really good pace for [Sebring] again and let’s see if we nailed the direction in which the car should go. Now with the new power curve and how we use that, I think it will be a challenge for us.”

Matt Bell, one of the drivers behind the wheel of the No. 13 Corvette Racing machine for AWA, said that his team has been focusing on refining their race car, too. Obviously, it worked – that same No. 13 Vette rallied to the GTD class win in the Rolex 24 back in January.

“From the AWA side, there have been a lot of refinements going on and a lot of learning with the car for a customer team,” Bell said. “We come into [Sebring] with a lot more knowledge than at any point last year. We put a lot of that into practice at Daytona and it seemed to go well.”