Meyer Shank Racing’s Jarvis, who last year raced the now-retired Mazda RT24-P, said the Acura was unexpectedly different from an LMP2 Oreca on which it is based.
“It’s a really interesting car,” said Jarvis, whose full-time MSR teammate for 2022 is Tom Blomqvist, the pair of them winning January’s Rolex 24 Hours along with Helio Castroneves and Simon Pagenaud. “Coming into it, myself and Tom were in a similar position and we both had P2 experience and you expect it to behave the same and that’s not the case.
“It’s quite a unique car and there are a lot of little nuances that make a big difference, and it takes time to learn these little details, and I’m certainly still doing that. It’s a great car, I really enjoyed Daytona but I feel there’s a lot to come from myself.
“We’re working closely with the team to fine-tune things. Obviously we had a good car at Daytona, but Sebring’s a very different race circuit.
“You know, drivers want everything! They want the car to be stable on entry, they want it to rotate at the apex, they want to improve traction – so we’re always asking a lot of the engineers. It’s just reducing the compromises, to make sure if you do stabilize the entry, you don’t compromise the mid-corner, don’t pick up too much understeer. And then Sebring with the bumps is a whole different ballgame. You focus a lot more on keeping the car compliant and also looking after the tires over the duration of a long stint.”
Jarvis admitted that his preconception that the Acura would be like a P2 car initially hindered his acclimation to his new ride for 2022. Now he says the big difference between the ARX-05 and his Mazda from last year is in the power delivery.
“The way the Acura delivers the power, the amount of torque it has, and also the traction control, it’s a very different beast to what we had at Mazda. It has a very sophisticated traction control system on it and getting your head around that, and I think there’s a lot of lap time finding the right settings that work for you. There’s a lot of adjustability, something that we didn’t use so much on the Mazda, so again, it’s a steep learning curve. Every time I’m in the car, I’m working closely with Tom and the engineers.”
By contrast, Ricky Taylor is in his fifth year with the ARX-05, having spent three years with Team Penske, culminating in a championship with Castroneves in 2020. Having returned ‘home’ to Wayne Taylor Racing, he is back in the ride where he won the 2017 championship driving a Cadillac DPi-V.R.
Comparing the Acura to the Cadillac, he said: “The Cadillac… felt more like a Cadillac! It was soft, didn’t make as much downforce, but wasn’t quite as edgy. When you go to the Acura, when you can really pack the downforce on, you can see where the Acura is going to be strong…
“We go to Long Beach and the Cadillacs are extremely strong over the bumpy tracks and then you go to Laguna Seca, the smooth high-speed tracks, and we’re really strong. Sebring falls somewhere in the middle where you get a bit of both. It’s bumpy where the Cadillacs do really well, but it’s also high-speed and you can really add quite a bit of downforce where the Acura does really well.”
Regarding how much the cars require setup adjustments according to the time of day and temperature shifts at Sebring, Taylor observed: “The Acura does have a very small window… in that it is a car meant to go to Le Mans… You run it in a small window, it’s very high speed, you have a few things you want it to do very well, and the track doesn’t change a whole lot. It gains grip but it doesn’t change a whole lot.
“But when you come to Sebring, it’s always a big balance between, ‘Do you want to be good at the beginning or do you want to be good at the end? Because you’re not going to be good at both, and the swing is so massive. You have to think about how we survive the daytime and make it to the night-time, not just attrition-wise but pace-wise and track position-wise… without mentally draining the drivers.”
