Antonio Garcia felt the Chevrolet Corvette Racing team had a problem free Rolex 24 at Daytona, but the team did not have the pace to match Ford Chip Ganassi Racing.
The #3 C7.R machine the Spaniard shared with Jan Magnussen and Mike Rockenfeller finished two laps off the pace of the leading Ford GT of Ryan Briscoe, Richard Westbrook and Scott Dixon despite having a near-perfect outing at the Daytona International Speedway.
Garcia felt the team can be relatively happy to bring home a podium, but the pace of the two Ford GTs was just too much for them to be a contender for the race win.
“I think we can be happy,” said Garcia on CorvetteRacing.com. “We again didn’t make any mistakes by the drivers, the pit stops were fine… we may have had an unscheduled stop for brakes. Other than that, everything worked perfect.
“We just didn’t have the pace. It was a little bit like what happened a lot last year. If this was Lime Rock, I’d be super happy with third. But here at Daytona or Le Mans, you only want to win. That’s part of our driver mentality… we want to win these races.
“But we can be proud. Our guys did a fantastic job. We showed all we had and gave it all. If the Fords were faster than us, we can’t do anything else but congratulate them. We just didn’t have enough to fight them, especially with the limited number of yellow flags.”
