Adaptability is key for this American sports car racer as he improves his technical knowledge, embraces a new language, and expands his sim racing skills.

I race in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, and the last three seasons we’ve been doing a full program, which is 11 events. But in 2021 we have a reduced program due to the fact that our class is getting phased out this year. We’re doing just the four main endurance races in the US, which are the Rolex 24 at Daytona, Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring presented by Advance Auto Parts—both of which have already taken place—and Sahlen’s Six Hours of the Glen at the end of June and Motul Petit Le Mans at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta, which is typically in October but was moved back to November this year.

So, BMW has restructured and is planning for the future, which includes a new class next year. We scaled back a little bit this year and moved some of those resources into developing the car for next year.

With the car, we’ve been looking to find a way to make the drivability window bigger. In previous years, the car has been pretty tricky to drive at its limit for an entire hour, so there were always mistakes that we would make over the course of the one-hour stint. It was very difficult to drive, especially as tire degradation began to kick in.

One of the biggest things that me and my engineer spoke about was how to make the car a little more forgiving and allow us to have that bigger window of drivability to reduce mistakes as tires degrade, or have the tires degrade at a slower rate. 

As far as physical work on the car, I don’t get involved. I definitely accept that the mechanics know a lot more than I do, so I let them do their job. However, I’m very involved in the engineering side, the technical understanding side, and the development side. I’m very intrigued with the technical side of motorsports, so I have quite a few calls throughout the month with my engineer to brainstorm ideas and discuss areas that we can improve on or are overlooking. We look at reports from different events and try to understand what we could’ve done better.

My main focus this season is on the four big IMSA races, but I also have a contract with BMW in Munich, Germany, to do four races for them at Nürburgring. The main show is the ADAC TOTAL 24 Hours of Nürburgring (a race I won in 2017) this month, and I had three preparation races at Nürburgring leading up to the big show.

In between races I have a simulator at my house, and BMW has us very involved with sim racing. It’s something pretty new, but something they are taking very seriously because they see value in it. They see the future in it. Racing is more and more expensive as years go by, so sim racing is a way for BMW to interact with motorsports fans at a different level and interact with their own drivers in a different style than just being at the race track. They’ve been pushing us quite heavily in the sim world. 

During April, we had several sim races that IMSA organized and live streamed. There were about 35 of us, pro IMSA drivers, racing against each other in the simulator championship. That’s something new and exciting, interesting for fans to watch, and something maybe they can relate more directly to since more people have simulators than race cars. Sim is something that takes up a lot of our time in between events, as well as fitness training like cycling and running.

Something I’m proud of, that has also proven beneficial, is that I’m fluent in German. My third year in Europe I lived in Austria for six months and drove with an Austrian team, and many of them didn’t speak a ton of English, so I started to learn some German there. And in my fourth year I drove with a fully German team, and they spoke zero English, so I had to know how to communicate with them, and that’s when I started learning at a quicker rate.

It definitely has helped me when driving for German teams and German brands. I think it goes a long way and makes me more marketable for them. I can do press events in Germany when I’m there, and I get to mingle with different groups that maybe I wouldn’t get a chance to if I wasn’t German speaking. It certainly has its benefits. 

As for my future in racing, I’m very content where I’m at now. My short-term goal is to get to the top level of sports car racing, which would be the prototype category. With the future of the rules and the way that they’re restructuring classes now, it’s going to be called the LMDh. I hope I get a chance to move up to that category.