NASCAR’s Chevy Camaro Le Mans Entry Matches GTD Lap Times Around Daytona

We now know that the NASCAR Chevy Camaro specially prepared for Le Mans is its own monster. It’s based on a NASCAR Next-Gen chassis and sports the same powertrain as the normal Cup car, but nothing else is exactly the same. All of its dive planes and suspension changes make it faster on a road course—so much faster that it apparently matches the pace of IMSA’s fastest GTD race cars around Daytona.

The feat was mentioned in a NASCAR.com blog and highlighted on Twitter by IMSA mechanic and occasional The Drive contributor Bozi Tatarevic. If the stock car is indeed fast enough to compete with GTD’s top racers, that would put its unofficial Daytona lap times somewhere around the 1:46 mark. The fastest GTD lap in last weekend’s Rolex 24 was 1:46.067, set by Heart of Racing’s Aston Martin Vantage GT3.

It’s hard to gauge how much faster the entrance to Garage 56 is than a normal NASCAR Cup car around Daytona, because the latter doesn’t drive the road course there. We may have more information later in the year when the Le Mans car trains on the same road circuits where the Cup cars race, such as Sonoma or the Charlotte roval. Either way, you can bet all that aero makes a difference in the corners.

“For me, I only did 20 laps, so it’s very difficult for me to say where the car is. But for me, it’s getting used to the position in the car. Obviously there’s body roll, it feels like it’s oversteering, but it’s not oversteering; it’s actually just the car itself that takes a set. So the car drives like in the Cup Series, it drives very low at the rear, so on the slope it’s like sitting on the ground. So it’s a lot to learn, but it’s a race car. And I can work with a racing car.

So while it clearly performs better on a road course than the average Cup car, it’s still a Cup car at its core.

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