
Photo: Jake Galstad/IMSA
Edoardo Mortara says he hopes that Riley’s new inputs and perspective on Lamborghini’s factory GTP program will be able to push the effort forward as it enters its second season in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
The Mooresville, N.C.-based squad has taken over as the service provider for Lamborghini’s top-level prototype program, although the entry is running under the Automobili Lamborghini Squadra Corse banner.
The switch comes as the SC63 enters its second year of competition, with Lamborghini having parted ways with previous partner team Iron Lynx after a single season.
Riley only got its hands on the SC63 on the Tuesday before the Roar Before the Rolex 24 and completed a shakedown Carolina Motorsports Park in Kershaw, S.C. before heading to Daytona.
Mortara, who shares the No. 63 car with Mirko Bortolotti, Daniil Kvyat and Romain Grosjean, gave an optimistic initial impression of the new service partnership between team and manufacturer, hailing Riley’s extensive WeatherTech Championship experience as a key asset.
“So far, it’s been going quite good,” Mortara told Sportscar3365.
“It’s a quite good, well experienced team and understanding actually quite quickly what are the challenges with this car and working on trying to find solutions.
“It’s a very, very experienced team, as I said and it helps because the car that we have is actually quite challenging to run and quite challenging actually to set up.”
“But obviously with their experience it seems that we quickly found actually some good solutions especially like technically.”
Mortara said he hopes Riley will be able to bring its own input and ideas to the partnership, which could help the program “explore new things” as it seeks to make progress in the second year.
“I think that it’s always very interesting to change teams because everyone has very specific opinions,” said Mortara.
“Probably with the previous team that we were running with, with Iron Lynx, we had some very good ideas and very strong opinions.
“When you move to a new team, maybe they see things like a little bit differently. And I think that it’s always good to progress and to explore new things.”
The SC63 is heading into only its second-ever 24-hour race this weekend, having not previously raced in the Rolex 24.
Mortara expressed hope that Lamborghini will be able to emulate its performance from last year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans, where its two-car effort finished the race and secured a top-ten finish.
“Le Mans seemed to be actually quite good for us,” said Mortara.
“It was one of the the best races that we had last year. And we kind of like proved last year that actually reliability for the car was actually not that bad.
“Especially if you think it was the first year for this car last year, it proved actually to be quite reliable.
“So I hope that it’s going to be the same here in Daytona and hopefully it can be a little bit more reliable than the others.”
Mortara himself kept a low profile when asked about expectations for the season ahead, saying that Lamborghini needs to take a step-by-step approach towards climbing up the competitive order.
“We have to prove firstly that we’re in the mix with the others,” he said.
“It didn’t seem to be the case actually last year, so now we need to be getting in the certain way we can where you can fight with the others.
“From there, we will see what we can achieve but I think that this is the first step and the team and Lamborghini, we’ll have work quite hard to catch up a little bit.”
