Nelson, Action Express Gunning for the First New GTP Championship

• Since the reunification of sports car racing under the IMSA sanction in 2014, Action Express has won the prototype championship five times and been the runner-up twice.

• With three races remaining, the Action Express team (managed by Gary Nelson, pictured above, right) leads the WeatherTech Championship points standings headed into the IMSA SportsCar Challenge at Road America on Sunday.

• The two hour, 40-minute race over the recently repaved 4.048-mile circuit in Wisconsin is known among IMSA combatants as Moving Day.

“Keep the wheels turning.”

That’s the philosophy Team Manager Gary Nelson uses to keep the Action Express Racing team and its Cadillac V-Series.R competitive.

As motivating mantras go, “Keep the wheels turning” might sound a little folksy or even vague. But it’s hard to quibble with Nelson’s results. Since the reunification of sports car racing under the IMSA sanction in 2014, Action Express has won the prototype championship five times and been the runner-up twice.

The current challenge for Nelson and drivers Pipo Derani and Alexander Sims is to win this year’s WeatherTech Championship in the first season of the new and complicated GTP hybrids. With three races remaining, the team leads the points standings headed into the IMSA SportsCar Challenge at Road America on Sunday.

“We’re expecting to go to Road America and perform equivalent to where we are in the points,” said Nelson. “Everybody in this series has some kind of issues and mistakes and problems with the new cars and the energy and electrics and new tires. Everything is kind of different than it was one year ago. We’ve all had some kind of setback. We’ve all made mistakes. Apparently, we’ve made less, because we have more points than the rest of them.”

The “rest of them” includes three teams that are within 63 points or less of Action Express. The No. 25 BMW M Team RLL (drivers Connor de Phillippi/Nick Yelloly) is just 10 points behind the leaders.

The Acura ARX-06 squad of Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti Autosport (Ricky Taylor/Felipe Albuquerque) is within 29 points, and the No. 6 Porsche 963 of Penske Motorsport (Nick Tandy/Mathieu Jaminet) trails by 63 points. With qualifying paying points, any one of the four could emerge from Road America with the championship lead.

The two hour, 40-minute race over the recently repaved 4.048-mile circuit in the Kettle Moraine region of Wisconsin is known among IMSA combatants as Moving Day. If you haven’t moved into contention for the championship leaving the land of bratwurst and Old Style beer, then a title is not likely to happen.

“I’m hoping that we can go forward without making mistakes based on how we understand the cars and the things that we can do wrong that loses us positions,” said Nelson, whose team is sponsored by Whelen Engineering and owned by Jim France, the chairman of IMSA. “I’m very encouraged that we set fast lap among all of the cars at Mosport and that we were near the fast lap at Watkins Glen.”

Keeping the wheels turning incorporates all aspects of winning races, which Nelson says is the primary attack when it comes to championships. Building on the team’s experience from race to race and concentrating on leaving nothing to chance in preparation are part of the pre-race mantra. “We never want to do something for the first time in a race,” he said.

Shorter pit stops, fewer mistakes in the pits or behind the wheel, and quickly rebounding from errors are the in-race focus. “When the car is stopped in the pits, let’s see if we can get the wheels turning again real quick,” said Nelson.

As for drivers, he trains them on quick recoveries. “If you get off in the grass and spin out, you’ve got to figure out how to keep those wheels spinning, get the clutch in, get the wheels pointed right. I don’t think most teams go to that depth with their driver training on simulators.”

The Action Express Cadillac infamously hit the barrier at this year’s Le Mans 24-hour on the first lap in the rain. It ruined any chance to score a podium in the team’s first trip to the French circuit. But young Jack Aitken kept the bashed and crippled Cadillac rolling until it was back in the pits.

“We were 17 laps down after we got in the fence on the first lap,” said Nelson. “Essentially, we gave Ferrari a 17-lap head start and in the last hour we were still only 17 laps down. Ferrari had lapped everybody else but the Toyota. To me, that was a pretty good testament to how good our car has been.”

Nelson’s mantra keeps the focus on the elements within the team’s control. It’s something he learned in his youngest days racing stock cars on short tracks in San Bernadino and Irwindale in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“We were constantly in championship battles, week in and week out at two different tracks,” he said. “We ended up winning quite a few of those championships. The ups and downs of running every weekend from spring to fall, in the hunt for two championships simultaneously, it prepared me to understand that some things you can control and some things you can’t control. If you spend any time worrying about it, you may take away time from things you can control. In that seven-year introduction to motorsports, I learned that points are important, but winning races will take care of the championship.”

Nelson won his most celebrated title as a stock car crew chief 40 years ago. His DiGard Racing team and Bobby Allison clinched the NASCAR Cup championship in November of 1983 in the season finale at the Riverside International Raceway.

The previous year, Nelson had made the mistake of taking a new car to Riverside, attempting to beat the team of Junior Johnson and his driver Darrell Waltrip to the title. The new car proved to be a steep learning curve.

“Taking that lesson from ’82 into ’83 I just wanted to make things better and build up to a peak at the end of the year. We won three races in a row going into the final stretch of the year. We didn’t bring out anything new. If somebody sent us this new whizbang part, we didn’t put it right on the car. None of that mentality. Nobody (on our team) had to think of something new at the end of the season headed into Riverside.”

Nelson is taking the same approach to the final three races of the WeatherTech Championship, which includes a stop at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Petit Le Mans. If his team receives a new trick part, he said, “We’ll put it on the list for winter testing.”