Tough Petit “Lights a Fire” Under BMW After First GTP Season

A tough Motul Petit Le Mans will ‘light the fire’ under BMW M Team RLL heading into the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship off-season, according to Connor De Phillippi.

The No. 25 BMW pairing of De Phillippi and Nick Yelloly entered last weekend’s ten-hour race with a shot at the GTP class title but dropped two places in the standings after finishing seventh alongside Sheldon van der Linde.

De Phillippi looked back positively on BMW’s return to the prototype ranks, which included five podiums and an inherited win at Watkins Glen, but didn’t hide his disappointment in how the campaign ended at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta.

Rating the season out of ten, the American driver told Sportscar365: “Honestly, I’d probably give it an eight, considering the unlucky stuff we had in Daytona with battery junk going on.

“Five podiums out of nine races… if you’d have told me before the season started if I’d take that, considering where the season started, I would say ‘hell yeah.’

“Obviously, it’s kind of a bitter ending to a great season going with the title fight and coming out of it down a few spots instead of up a few spots, it doesn’t leave a good taste in your mouth.

“But it definitely lights the fire underneath us to come back for next year.”

De Phillippi said there were areas in which the BMW M Hybrid V8 was “the best it’s been” this season, but multiple setbacks also influenced the team’s race at Petit.

The title-contending No. 25 machine received a stop and 60-second hold for Sheldon van der Linde jumping the pit exit light, plus a further drive-through for hitting the Action Express Racing Cadillac V-Series.R.

Full course caution periods helped to bring it back onto the lead lap and Yelloly was running second after five hours, only for a fuel sensor issue to cause a slow pit stop that dropped De Phillippi to seventh.

“It was a sensor that decided to break during the race,” De Phillippi explained.

“It connects to the fuel hose and tells it that it’s refueling, but if one’s not talking to the other, it doesn’t know it’s refueling.

“It was just one of those races where everything kept not quite piecing together and it makes life difficult.

“It took half the race to finally get up there to the front with strategy, after the one lap down deal. But once we got up there, we were like ‘shoot, now we’re in this thing.’

“And then at the next pit stop, that happened. So it put us back on the back foot. We were kind of on the back foot all day, actually.”

The BMW drivers also struggled for traction out of the slower corners at Road Atlanta, according to De Phillippi.

“There were other areas we were really weak on that really exposed themselves during the race,” he said.

“We just didn’t have some of the bump compliance and traction that some of the competitors have. And this is the race where you need it: a lot of the passing zones are led on by a slow corner.

“Working your way through traffic, it’s a lot of point and squirt and if you keep getting stuck behind cars and they keep opening gaps on you, it’s hard to recover from that.

“We didn’t run a clean race: drivers made mistakes and as a team we made a couple of mistakes. So it wasn’t our cleanest day.

“To win this championship, all the stars had to align, and we had to run a perfect race. Unfortunately, it just didn’t happen.

“I think we can be happy with the package we brought for the amount of testing we’ve been doing. That’s something we need to do more of compared to the competition.

“I think we have our work cut out for us over the winter to put our noses to the grindstone and try to make some steps in areas where we know we’re weak.”

Asked what specific areas RLL needs to work on during the three-month gap until the 2024 Rolex 24 at Daytona, De Phillippi said: “Just improving everywhere, really.

“Setup-wise, we have to find some real performance. That’s the underlying factor at the moment, compared to the competition.

“We have a lot of power in us, but at the moment we’re not putting it to the ground as best as we can.

“We need to figure out how to find some traction and not sacrifice balance in other parts of the track.”