Povoledo: “All Roads Were Pointing” to Corvette Switch

Photo: John Dagys

Chouest Povoledo Racing team principal Aaron Povoledo said that “all roads were pointing” towards a switch to Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.Rs, after evaluating the GT3 marketplace over the last six to eight months.

The Louisiana-based squad, which made its GT3 debut last year with Mercedes-AMG GT3 Evos, has become the latest Corvette customer team, which will see a dual-series GT World Challenge America powered by AWS and GT America powered by AWS campaign this year.

Speaking with Sportscar365, Povoledo revealed the timeline for its off-season transformation.

“This has been working in the background since the second half of last season,” he said. “There was at least six or eight months of deliberating and evaluating options.

“By the time we had the unfortunate crash at Road America and lost one of the cars, we were like, ‘Do we make the change?’

“Then at Barber when we got t-boned by the car that ran out of brakes and both cars were dead, it’s like, ‘Well, we’re down to zero [chassis]. What’s our best option?’

“After a lot of deliberation, what really won us over was the amount of commitment that both General Motors and Pratt Miller were really showing.

“The amount of answered phone calls, the amount of answered questions and amount of time given as a prospective customer…

“There’s a lot of manufacturers that I’m still waiting for their returned phone call, from November.”

Povoledo said he leaned on fellow GT3 entrant and Canadian Andrew Wojteczko, of AWA Racing, which recently claimed a breakthrough Rolex 24 at Daytona class victory with the car, as well as Alec Udell, who drove the Corvette to a record eight Pro class wins in GTWC America last year, for a “ton of really frank” conversations of how the car performs.

“All roads were pointing towards one of the greatest engineering think-tanks of the modern era of American motorsports, Pratt Miller,” said Povoledo.

“In this day and age, the amount of engineering that you need to be competitive in GT3 has really gone to a next level.

“So either you have actual factory support or you have hundreds of thousands of dollars of extra budget to do it yourself, and then the challenge becomes finding the engineers qualified to do it.

“We’re still a growing team in our second year of GT3. I don’t have access to real aerodynamicists and access to guys that can go to a tire dyno and tire model stuff for me.

“The Pratt Miller option seemed like the obvious choice with the amount of engineering support they give you. It’s truly incredible.”

The team received both brand-new chassis on Feb. 7 and had time for a brief shakedown with one of the cars at NOLA Motorsports Park before heading west to Sonoma Raceway for this weekend’s season-opening races.

Povoledo will again co-drive with Ross Chouest in the GTWC America races in the Pro-Am class, with Chouest entered solo in the GT America SRO3 category.

“This is really ground zero for us,” Povoledo said. “So far so good. Mechanically, they’ve been awesome. They’re pretty easy to drive. There’s no real massive technique difference.

“To go from a front-engined to a mid-engined car, I was expecting it to take some real adaptation. But no, it’s just ‘drive it.’

“I think it’s a gentleman-friendly car. There are nuances of extracting ultimate speed out of it. We’re on Day 2 of that learning curve right now.

“The guys at Pratt Miller are really articulate on what those differences are as well. How to get this car to maximize its speed through corners and technique-wise.

“We’re well-briefed on what this thing wants.

“That’s a fun part as a driver, to get used to these different things between the cars, and maximizing it.

“But in the short term it’s just getting laps under our belt, get the boys used to working on these cars.

“Like any new GT3 cars, these are massively complicated machines.”

Povoledo said he’s setting realistic targets for their first weekend but praised the work so far done by his crew.

“It’s just going to get better as we get more and more used to the tooling, the equipment, the staff that we have,” he said.

“I love it. We have a lot of carry over guys that have now been with me for three years from Year 2 of the GT4 program into last year’s GT3 and into this year is awesome.

“I’m just so proud of the guys and the job they do. It’s just getting better.”