- Search Cartoons
- Comic Archive
-
Payne
Store
Henry Payne RSS
How Team Fehan built Corvette into a racing powerhouse
Posted by Talbot Payne on February 8, 2021
When the Chevy Corvette C8.R race cars rolled across the line 1-2 at the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona Sunday, it wasn’t just another win for the storied race team. It also made for the perfect management hand-off from legendary Corvette race boss Doug Fehan, 72, to new chief Laura Klauser, 34.
Over the last 24 years, Fehan built one of sports-car racing’s premier programs. And made Corvette one of the world’s best super cars in the process.
>
From its stealthy beginnings inside General Motors Corp. in 1996, Corvette Racing was conceived by Fehan as a way to not just raise the profile of the Chevrolet brand, but to take Corvette to another level as one of the industry’s best-engineered cars. In so doing he brought a racing culture to GM that today parallels some of the world’s most renowned racing brands, Porsche and Ferrari.
“When we look at all the achievements we’ve garnered over the years, I think the most important to me personally was this technology transfer,” Fehan said in an interview. “This concept of taking what we learn on the race track and being able to . . . weave it into the fabric of the production vehicles. That was one of my main objectives. I believed in motorsports and I knew it was way more than a checkered flag and a trophy.
Over four generations of Corvette race cars — from the C4.R to the current C8.R — Fehan’s team helped integrate race engineering into production cars. That evolution has resulted in the extraordinary, $59,995 C8 production super car, the first mid-engine ‘Vette that has wowed the world with performance and design befitting European super cars that cost four times as much.
Corvette chief engineer “Tadge Juechter … had been around long enough to see what I tried to do with C5, C6 and C7 and he was totally cooperative and on board,” said Fehan. “We put on a collaborative effort — between the race team and the production team — unequaled inside GM and probably anyplace in the world. That to me is as satisfying as the championship.”
The three-decade journey also made Fehan one of the most recognized figures in the pit lane from Daytona to France’s 24 Hours of Le Mans, where Corvette Racing won eight times. Gruff, honest, and eccentric, Fehan was a racer’s manager.
>
Juggling the responsibilities of managing a race team for one of the world’s largest corporations, Fehan also gained the respect of some of the world’s greatest drivers including NASCAR’s Dale Earnhardt (who raced for him in 2001), sports-car great Ron Fellows, and international star Jan Magnussen.
“Consider this was a factory-supported program with consistent support at that level for so long — it is absolutely the premier (sports car) program anybody’s ever put together,” said race driver Andy Pilgrim, one of the sport’s most accomplished sports car pilots who scored Corvette’s first win in 2000 in Texas (with co-driver Fellows).
Pilgrim compared Fehan to Porsche’s Alwin Springer, the influential head of Porsche Motorsports North America, that helped make that marque a dominant force in the German brand’s largest market. Pilgrim raced with Porsche before Fehan approached him to race Corvettes.
>
“I’d already worked with Alwin, and then going to Doug — it doesn’t get any better than that. It was an amazing factory program,” Pilgrim said in an interview. “Doug has a unique way of understanding, working with his drivers. It’s a gift.”
The fiercely independent Pilgrim and the corporate boss Fehan hit it off. As skillful as he was at navigating GM’s corporate hallways, Fehan was fiercely independent as well. In an age of collared team shirts and matching uniforms up and down the pit lane, Fehan stood out.Get the COVID-19 Update newsletter in your inbox.
Updates on how the coronavirus is affecting your community and the nationDelivery: VariesYour Email
“He was beloved in the pits with his acerbic wit,” said Steven Cole Smith, veteran race writer for Autoweek and other publications. “He would show up in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and neon running shoes.”
With years of racing management under his belt including GM’s Oldsmobile Aurora prototype program, Fehan got the green light to develop the Corvette program in late 1996. It was a tightly kept secret even in GM.
“We developed that car in total secret. There wasn’t an Internet There weren’t cell phones. There wasn’t all the electronic media you have today,” Fehan said. “There were very few people within GM that even knew we were developing that car.”
>
The Corvette C5.R debuted in the Daytona 24 Hour GT class in January, 1999 — leading much of the race before finishing second on one of the world’s biggest stages. The pressure packed moment would launch an unprecedented run of over 100 IMSA wins over the next two decades.
“My bosses thought we were crazy wanting to debut at Daytona — a 24 hour event, the most grueling race in North America. But I told them, this is where we have to go to learn,” remembered Fehan. “The GM executives were there, they were thrilled, they were watching it happen, they watched the teamwork. All the things we professed would happen, did happen. And they began to see the value of what we were doing.”
Corvette Racing would go on to win 14 team championships, highlighted by eight Le Mans victories. “The first Le Mans victory was just stunning,” Fehan said, “the most emotional event you could possibly have in a lifetime.”https://256d63e6cc406071b2535031d2d6c630.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
But for all the competitive highs and lows, the program’s North Star was always what Fehan dubbed “cascade engineering” — making the production car better via racing.
“Product relevance has always been paramount in my mind. That’s how you connect with the customer,” he said. “The final distillation is: we need to sell cars. That’s the business we are in.”
Race driver Pilgrim was fully aware of his role in a much bigger factory machine: “We would get engineers that would be (with the race program) for a year. Then they disappeared back to GM. . . back to design or wherever. I thought that was brilliant.”
That integration survived through ups and downs in the auto industry, through multiple GM CEOs — even the near cancellation of the ‘Vette program during the 2009 Great Recession.
With the eighth generation Corvette C8 — the first with its engine behind the driver — the program realized its full potential.
“This was the first time that we were really able to start with a clean sheet of paper between engineering and racing. The result is astounding,” Fehan said of a production product and race car that have been runaway successes since they first turned a wheel a year ago.
>
The C8.R race car won the IMSA championship in its first year. The C8 production car sold out its first year and is back-logged for its second. Now the 2021 season is off and running with a Daytona GT victory already in hand.
The baton has been handed off to Klauser, GM’s first Sports Car Racing Program Manager, who will integrate the Corvette team under one GM umbrella that includes IMSA Cadillac prototypes and Camaro GT cars.https://256d63e6cc406071b2535031d2d6c630.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
“Doug is a key piece of Corvette Racing’s history,” Klauser said in an interview. “He was there from the beginning and helped establish the strong team we are so proud of today. I appreciate the support Doug has given me during the GM Motorsport Competition transition period we’re going through. I’m excited to continue building on the Corvette Racing legacy.”
Website Copyright © 2009 - 2021 Henry Payne