By snoadmin
“It was 1999 when my wife and I decided we’re both interested in it; it’s time to do it,” Dave Robertson, the driver of the No. 40 car, said of his interest in Le Mans racing.
Robertson competed today in the American Le Mans series with a Doran Ford GT-R in the GT2 category.
Robertson had a dream of one day becoming a racecar driver. Due to financial reasons, Robertson said that he wasn’t able to do that right out of college. He had to wait 20 years or more go by.
Robertson sometimes thinks he’s gotten in over his head, “But we are surrounded by a lot of really smart people that are getting us the knowledge we need to belong here,” he said.
“Right now we’re at the stage where we can make it into the race. But we have some improvements to do to the car and some training to do on us to get to where we can compete,” Robertson said. “By the second half of the season we should be looking better.”
Robertson explained what his training regimen is like. “A lot of it is just racing with other sanctioning bodies, amateur-type stuff. We’ll also rent tracks. We have a professional driver, David Murray, who works with us, and we’ll put him in a car and go to a track we’ve rented and work and use him as a coach. He’ll show us ‘You can get through that turn faster without sliding off the track,’ and he can coach us and teach us. It’s been invaluable,” Roberts said.
“I wish I had that kind of coaching when we started back in 1999, but we didn’t. So we are learning a lot. Now we’re also engrossed in bringing a new car into the series, and that’s going to be an awful lot of fun,” Roberts said.
This was Robertson’s first time at the Long Beach race. “I came over and watched the Formula One race in about 1979 and that’s the only time I’ve ever been here. So it’s new to us,” Robertson said.
Robertson, originally from Scottsdale, Ariz., currently resides north of Detroit.
“I’m a Michigan guy, but I’m feeling right at home, it’s the same weather around here in Michigan today probably,” Robertson said. “I love it out here, of course. If there were just a third as many people I’d move here. But I can’t take the crowd, the traffic. But it’s gorgeous.”
To prepare Robertson and his team practiced and learned by watching video from a camera inside of another car. This way they can see everything that’s happening as it’s happening.
“If we didn’t do that, the truth is we’d probably, as a less experienced driver, we’d probably learn the track too slow to make the speeds to get in the race. The in-car videos help a lot. The data analysis helps a lot,” Robertson said.
Robertson and Murray raced the No. 40 car in the Tequila Patron American Le Mans Series, finishing in 25th place.
“The good thing is we finished,” Robertson said after the race. “This is the first ALMS race I’ve finished. I tried to finished Sebring but crashed nine and a half hours into it and it’s a twelve-hour race.”
Robertson said that the raced helped him figure out what needs to be done to the car. “It again is a lesson in what we have to do to improve ourselves and improve the car. The car is about five percent off the pace. We have a lot of thoughts on how to improve that, but we won’t be able to start that until after Miller,” he said.
Robertson also said that he knows he needs to work on himself too.
“There are also things we have to do to improve me,” Robertson said, “and that involves … playing with limits a bit more and getting more comfortable being on the edge so that I’m not so damn careful on the narrow canyons of the street course. We’re losing a lot of time being too cautious and it puts us in the way of other people. So we need to pick it up.”
Robertson said he enjoyed himself at today’s race. “We’re having fun. We just have a long list of things I’ve got to do to raise our game to where we belong here. It’s pretty easy to make that list and pretty easy to just knock them off one at a time. So we’ll get there.”
