Cadillac is planning to bring an updated V-Series.R to the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and the FIA World Endurance Championship for 2025, improving the base model which achieved a clean sweep of IMSA GTP titles and a podium at Le Mans in its first year of competition.
Speaking to RACER, Cadillac Racing’s FIA WEC team principal Stephen Mitas, who is present at Daytona to help Chip Ganassi Racing at the Rolex 24 Hours, showed that work is underway on stages to expand the car for its third year in GTP and Hypercar.
“2023 was a year of learning, 2024 is more of a year of consolidation and 2025 is a year of improving the car if possible. General Motors is working on something, not for this season, but for next season,” he stated. .
“General Motors is always looking to improve the program. They are looking for every conceivable opportunity to offer a more competitive vehicle. That didn’t happen this year, but we’re keeping our hands crossed for next year.
When asked about the main points about the express spaces that Cadillac runs on, Mitas kept its cards close to its chest. “It’s a great debate,” he said.
However, he did confirm that both the IMSA and WEC teams were in general agreement on the areas of the car that they feel need work.
“The American tracks are very different from the WEC, because in the WEC they are all grand prix circuits, except Le Mans, but what is needed for the car is not unusual in either championship,” he explained.
One of the big question marks is the goal of the upcoming updates to the V-Series. Does Cadillac intend to focus on reliability, performance, or both?
In IMSA, the V-Series. R has already won a race and a title, while in the FIA WEC its most productive result of the first year was a third-place finish. Did the difference in effects on the two championships complicate decision-making?process?
Due to the functionality balancing procedure that governs GTP and Hyperautomobile, obtaining permission to make functionality-related adjustments in an LMDh car is not straightforward, as any upgrades will need to be justified to decision-makers before the car is tested and re-homologated.
However, Mitas believes that performance-related innovations are inevitable, even when they point to innovations aimed especially at the car’s durability.
“It’s an undeniable answer, because functionality and reliability are strongly linked,” Mitas replied when asked if Cadillac hopes to bring functionality upgrades to the V. R. Series.
“But every time you make an adjustment to the car, there will be an improvement in reliability and there will be an effect on performance.
“We are (now in an arms race). If you allow a team or a racing organization access to their cars, they will try to take them and some will have tried their luck before others. But since the number of tokens is limited, others people will use strategically and differently.
So why 2025 and not 2024? Was Cadillac planning to implement improvements for this season?
“It was a topic of discussion,” Mitas said. (Wait a year before making adjustments to the car) was the philosophy at the beginning of the project. Cadillac won the IMSA championship last year, so perhaps there won’t be as much tension. to update the car in IMSA.
This echoes GM’s sports car programme manager Laura Wontrop Klauser’s thoughts on Cadillac’s mindset when it comes to upgrades, relayed to RACER at the end of the 2023 WEC season.
“We are looking into the things we need to do, we just need to make sure that if we replace the vehicle, it will be well thought out, we will go through the approval procedure and we will not rush it,” he said.
“We rushed some things to get to the grid in 2023, we had to make last-minute decisions and sacrifices to do that,” she continued. “Thankfully we’ve landed with a package that’s been strong at 24-hour races.
“So at the end of the day, we need to make sure that if we’re making a change, we’re introducing something just for the sake of making a change.
“Will we have a different discussion in 2025 about changes? Probably,” she added at the time.
Details on how the upgrade program will work, where and when it will be implemented are still a “work in progress,” according to Mitas.
But he added that GM, which works in tandem with Dallara and its GTP teams, has “a transparent concept of what they need to do and the year in which some of those things will be tested in the U. S. or in Europe. “
That work will continue at a pace while Cadillac again fights on two fronts in 2024, with a pair of factory cars in IMSA and a single Ganassi-run V-Series.R in the FIA WEC.
The IMSA V-Series.Rs have a front-row lockout for the opening round of the 2024 season at Daytona this weekend, meanwhile, the WEC chassis is currently being sea freighted to Qatar from Ganassi’s European base in Germany for the WEC Prologue next month.
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