Steller “Pushing” to Bring Back Second Full Season Corvette

Photo: JEP/SRO

Steller Motorsport is “pushing” to have its second full season Corvette entry present at round two of the GT World Challenge Europe powered by AWS Endurance Cup at Monza according to its team manager, who described the team’s series debut at Paul Ricard as “phenomenal.”

The British squad made its maiden GTWC Europe appearance with a single Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R at Le Castellet, with the Silver Cup trio of Matisse Lismont, Kiern Jewiss and Lorcan Hanafin finishing second in class.

That came as part of a scaled-down effort for the team after it had originally been displayed on the full season entry list with two cars, both in Bronze Cup.

Instead, Steller debuted in Paul Ricard with a single Silver Cup car, with team manager Max Daymond explaining to Sportscar365 that the class switch came as a result of a larger-than-anticipated level of interest from Silver drivers.

“Over the pre-season we were talking to a lot of drivers and [with] the level of interest from Silver drivers, [it] became apparent fairly quickly that actually it would make a lot of sense for us to run a Silver car and a Bronze car,” said Daymond.

“That was our intention. So the Silver car came together with three strong drivers and ended up with a good result at Paul Ricard, which was fantastic.”

However, the second car, which was still slated to run in Bronze Cup, was absent in France.

According to Daymond, the team has not given up on the idea of a two-car effort and hopes to realize that in time for the second round of the Endurance Cup at the start of June.

“The Bronze Car, unfortunately, the deal fell apart at the last the last hurdle,” said Daymond.

“We were hopeful to have that out for Paul Ricard and unfortunately it didn’t happen.

“We’re pushing to try and get the car out for Monza.

“We’d like to have a full season deal in place for that car so that we can sort of showcase it and have two cars out on the grid. But at the moment, that’s still an ongoing negotiation.”

In addition to its Endurance Cup program, Steller will also make its Sprint Cup debut at Brands Hatch this weekend, which Daymond revealed came as part of Lismont’s desire to run a full GTWC Europe campaign.

Lismont, who will be paired up with Finnish racer Jesse Salmenautio in Sprint Cup, was also part of the crew that secured second in the Silver Cup at Paul Ricard.

Daymond noted that that result “exceeded expectations” even though the team was focused on delivering the best debut performance possible.

“I always say that I never enter a race without thinking that I can go and win it,” said Daymond.

“I think that’s the mentality you’ve got to have because if you fail to prepare or if you sort of go into it with a mentality of, ‘Oh, well, we’ll just make up the numbers,’ then that’s exactly what you’ll do.

“As a team we were focused on trying to have the best result that we could in a six-hour race.

“A lot can happen within that time and it’s very easy to drop down the order very quickly even if it is through something that’s no fault of your own. 

“So for us it was about having a clean race, trying to show the pace of the drivers and ideally come out with a half decent result.

“I think we kind of exceeded expectations on that one to have a second place on our first attempt as it were, our first round, was phenomenal.”

Although Steller still runs Audi machinery on occasion, like at last weekend’s Silverstone 500 in the British GT Championship, it has largely pivoted over to Corvette.

“We had different conversations with different manufacturers over an extended period, just trying to understand what options were out there and then what the pros and cons of each option were,” Daymond said about the brand switch.

“There were some that didn’t work for us because we wanted to have flexibility, so we wanted to be able to enter ACO championships, so having access to an LMGT3 kit was a big thing for us.

“We also wanted to understand what the ethos was of the manufacturer and how they were approaching their support packages, what opportunities were on offer etcetera.

“So for us, we started up the conversation with Corvette last year, and it was immediately apparent that there was a nice common ground between our approach and theirs.

“They want to keep the volume of cars in the marketplace quite small and they want to keep the number of teams that run those cars quite small as well so that they can support everything in the right way.

“I think their approach with meetings with all the car owners on a sort of bi-weekly basis [and] the information flow, for us was a big selling point.

“Because at least it means that we’re not in the dark as to what’s going on around the world.

“We know that if someone’s had a failure even if it’s not failed yet [for us], it was something that could potentially become an issue [and] we’re aware of it straight away.

“We know what to check for, we know what is coming in the pipeline. That information flow was a big thing for us.

“The support that we’ve received from them so far has been fantastic, both on and off site.”