Piccini confessed he was taken aback when its new car outpaced all of its GTP class rivals on the opening day of running at Daytona on Wednesday, although it won’t compete in next month’s Daytona 24 Hours but will instead make its IMSA SportsCar Championship debut at Sebring in March.
“I think it’s developing well,” said Piccini. “The first day was very positive, the car ran without major issues.
“Honestly, the pace is there. The time was great, we were a little bit surprised as well to be immediately so competitive but there is so much to do to make the car reliable, to be able to run consistently, to use the tires properly – there’s a lot to do.
“We had a slow start in the morning because we had some stuff to finish – in IMSA things are a little different, at 7pm everything closes here, whereas in Europe we work until late at night! We had a lot of work to do and not enough time, so we had to carry it out in the morning.
“But it’s certainly very encouraging to be leading the first session.”
Piccini was also happy with the reliability displayed by the car so far, and insisted that the big accident suffered by Mirko Bortolotti during its second full test at Paul Ricard in the third week of August didn’t set back the program too much.
“I think you need to put something like this in the account, let’s say, to have crashes like this during the development of the car,” he said. “There were some tests planned straight after but we changed the program to different activities.
“I can’t say it’s positive to have a crash but it showed some areas that we needed to improve on the car. From a negative thing, for sure, we took out some positives and have a stronger and even more reliable car.
“The testing program has been running pretty much without major problems right from the beginning, apart from Day 1 when we had to adjust some small things on the engine.
“We’ve done a good mileage on all the testing days we have done, with some small issues here and there, pieces to change and adjust, a lot of electronic settings to be in the right range of power to use properly the hybrid system.
“So we’re far from being perfect, let’s say, from the hybrid part of the engine. Overall it’s been running well.”
