When Earl Bamber took to the track in the late hours of the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring, he was calm. The gap between his Chip Ganassi Racing No. 2 Cadillac DPi-V.R and the next competitor was 25 seconds. It was two hours to go until the checkered flag.
“Let’s go win this thing,” Bamber recalls thinking.
Within the first hour, Bamber’s heart rate spiked to 195 beats per minute. The driver from New Zealand fell out of the lead twice after a drive-through penalty and a collision with the No. 21 AF Corse Ferrari 488 GT3 driven by Simon Mann — all in a matter of minutes.
As a driver who had yet to taste an overall victory at Sebring Int’l Raceway, Bamber was determined to recover from his mistakes and race wheel-to-wheel for the win. With the way the Cadillac was performing, the victory was still within sight.
“I was thinking, Chip’s probably going to fire me come Monday if I don’t win this race,” Bamber said with a laugh.
Meanwhile in the pits, Chip Ganassi Racing’s lead engineer Danielle Shepard was closely following the drama taking place on the race track.
“We were doing our best to maintain and not give anything up at that point,” she said, referring to Bamber’s switch into the driver’s seat. “Then Earl gets in the car and gives us three heart attacks.”
Sebring marked Shepard’s second race as the team’s lead engineer. Up until the final practice before the race was set to be underway, she was still tweaking away at the Cadillac. The Cadillac tested strong in all conditions at the track, but regardless, Shepard was focused on dialing in the car’s performance for the critical night hours of the race.
“We knew we had a solid car for the evening, we just had to get through the day,” Shepard said.
The iconic 3.74-mile road course is famous for being a test of endurance for every car and a measure of desire for every driver who gets behind the wheel.
Along with developing the No. 2 Cadillac to achieve premium performance, Chip Ganassi Racing had assembled a strong lineup of drivers for the 12 Hours of Sebring event — including former Sebring winner Alex Lynn and Neel Jani who were co-driving with Bamber.
The clock read 45 minutes to go when Bamber maneuvered his way past Richard Westbrook in the No. 5 JDC-Miller Cadillac in his final pass for the lead.
From there, it was a straight shot to the checkered flag. The No. 2 Cadillac claimed victory at the 70th 12 Hours of Sebring, and Bamber enjoyed his first overall victory at the track.
“For me, the Sebring race is right up there with Le Mans, because it was such a hard, grueling race. You saw a lot of drivers getting out completely exhausted,” Bamber says. “It was definitely an eventful race.”
He also credits the Cadillac’s win to the pit calls and strategy from Shepard, who has had her own name written into the record books as one of a select few female engineers who have achieved success at Sebring. Her name goes alongside motorsports figures such as Leena Gade, who was the first woman to claim an engineer victory at Sebring in 2013.
The Chip Ganassi Racing team will chase another IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship victory during the April 8 Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach.