Oddity? Novelty? Fan-Favourite? The Allure Of NASCAR Garage 56

To a boy born and raised in NASCAR country, the sight of a diminutive Renault Twingo parked on the side of a street in the town of Arnage, France feels more exotic and out of the ordinary than seeing a NASCAR race car. But in France, a Twingo is as common a sight as the town bakery.

On the opposite side of the cultural spectrum, hundreds of people gathered in the centre of Le Mans to look at a blue and silver, seventh-generation NASCAR Chevrolet Camaro ZL1.

It’s a car that, like NASCAR itself, is practically synonymous for many Americans as the first thing they think about when they hear someone talk about racing. But for the locals here in France, this is something exotic, marvellous, and unique.

It’s something that hasn’t raced in the 24 Hours of Le Mans for many generations. It’s quintessentially American, and this crowd of people – primarily from France and from elsewhere around the world – can’t get enough of it.

John Doonan, the President of the International Motor Sports Association (IMSA), was one of the driving forces behind bringing this car to Le Mans. It’s given him an incredible rush of energy to see the reception to what he, NASCAR, and perennial championship-winning outfit Hendrick Motorsports have brought across the Atlantic.

“All week, the reception for this team, this project, from everyone – from scrutineering to corner marshals to safety officials – the welcome and kindness we have received is amazing,” said Doonan. “These folks seem thrilled to have us here.”

This kind of energy has caught a man like Jenson Button, who’s raced at the glamorous Monaco Grand Prix several times across his decorated run as a Formula One World Champion, off guard.

“There’s been a lot of people interested in taking pictures of it because it’s something so different than what races here at Le Mans,” says Button. He’s driven at Le Mans before, five years ago – but not in anything like the car he’ll be driving this weekend.

It’s an experience that is relatively new not just to Button, but also to Mike Rockenfeller (everyone usually calls him “Rocky”), the well-respected German driver that won the 2010 24 Hours of Le Mans aboard an Audi R15 prototype with almost a polar opposite design and function to this Camaro.

But it’s less of an unusual experience to the third member of this all-star driving fleet: Jimmie Johnson, unilaterally regarded as the greatest NASCAR driver of his generation, and one of the best of any generation before or since.

The seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion walked away from the sport full-time at the end of 2020 to pursue a number of “bucket-list races” including the Indianapolis 500 – and now, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, for the first time at age 47.

“I probably had the least amount of adjustment needed. But for Rocky and Jenson, driving the car, it’s much different than anything they’d been in before,” Johnson said. That’s not to say the experience is completely foreign to his British and German co-drivers, who’ve entered NASCAR Cup Series road course races in order to prepare for Le Mans – along with a rigorous private testing schedule that has spanned several months.

And in fact, the exchange of ideas has even influenced Johnson during his part-time return to NASCAR racing this year – he did a seat fit for the Garage 56 car and liked the feel of it so much, that he now uses that seat in his own #84 Legacy Motor Club Camaro in the Cup Series.

When the project was first announced just a year and a quarter ago, there was quite a bit of surprise. Some very positive reactions and curiosity. And of course, some cynicism as well – at the idea of entering an American stock car into the 24 Hours of Le Mans’ innovative exhibition class. ‘What’s innovative about a NASCAR just because it has working headlights and some big aero bits on it?'”

First, there’s no such thing as “a NASCAR” but a NASCAR vehicle, just like there’s no such thing as “a Nintendo” but a Nintendo video game console. Second, Garage 56 as an exhibition category is limitless. And yes, the perception is that it’s aimed squarely at attracting cars powered by alternative energy sources.

But the DeltaWing which introduced Garage 56 in 2012 was simply a strange design with a conventional, petrol-powered engine, wasn’t it? And apart from accessibility modifications for “drivers of determination” like Frederic Sausset, Takuma Aoki, and Nigel Bailly – the SRT41 LMP2 prototypes were identical to the ones driven by their able-bodied peers, weren’t they?

And at the end of the day, this is something much, much different to a typical Le Mans challenger – it’s not a purpose-built prototype or a sporty GT car. It’s something that hasn’t been seen since a Dodge Charger and a Ford Torino turned up from NASCAR with minimal modifications to the 1976 edition of the race.

And there’s so much more work that has gone into preparing this car for Le Mans, beyond the addition of actual headlights for night-time driving, instead of just stickers.

The Garage 56 NASCAR vehicle is something of a spiritual successor to another legendary creation from the legendary Hendrick Motorsports garage: “T-Rex,” the experimental 1997 Chevrolet Monte Carlo which pushed the envelope of stock car racing development further than anything ever seen in NASCAR to date, won that year’s All-Star Race in the hands of the legendary Jeff Gordon, and was promptly barred from ever running again in any official races.

Unsurprisingly, the number 24 which Hendrick and Gordon made famous adorns the Garage 56 car.

Under the carbon composite body, and beneath the Le Mans-style splitter, massive dive planes, and relatively towering 152mm rear spoiler (a typical NASCAR spoiler stands 102mm tall), the Le Mans-spec Camaro ZL1 is 525 pounds (238 kilogrammes, in new currency) lighter than the cars that compete in NASCAR’s top division on a regular basis.

As Doonan also explains, “Goodyear has also put so much work into this to develop new tyres. And Chevrolet has taken the DNA of a Cup engine and got it ready for twice around the clock.”

“It’s the DNA of a NASCAR vehicle,” Johnson says. “We’ve been able to put it on a diet, put carbon brakes on it, and then add some downforce.”

“Our concern was that a traditional NASCAR vehicle makes its lap time on the straightaways, not in the turns. And we wanted to be able to blend in, and kind of fit the performance levels of the other cars. They’ve taken some straightaway speed away from us, but at the same time we’ve added downforce and made the car much lighter, so it should handle a little bit better through the corners.”

But apart from these changes, it’s just like the car that runs 36 weekends a year around America.

Johnson knows full well about the challenges of taking a heavy stock car, usually engineered with the same level of precision as a Le Mans Hypercar just to go as fast in an oval as possible, around a winding road course. It’s something Button’s still trying to get his head around.

“The Porsche Curves are going to be tough,” Button says confidently. “We’ll have a bit too much understeer through there just the way the car is.”

“With this car, changing directions is a big thing, because it’s so heavy,” he added about the effect of weight transfer. “So we use a lot of the circuit.”

Of course, it’s not just the car or the driving style that makes the NASCAR Garage 56 challenger so unique compared to the other 61 entries in the entry list at Le Mans.

NASCAR pit stops are a uniquely choreographed spectacle all to themselves. Without the use of built-in air jacks, with only a canister of fuel instead of a full gravity-fed rig, well-drilled crews of five mechanics that are as athletic as a gridiron football player can refuel and change four tyres in 15 seconds or less.

That unique dance will still be present within the Garage 56 programme. Not at the insistence of NASCAR, but at the insistence of the Automobile Club de l’Ouest (ACO) – the promoters of the 24 Hours of Le Mans – and its long-serving President, Pierre Fillon. “They wanted us to do traditional NASCAR pit stops, that was their idea, to really show off what NASCAR is all about,” Doonan said.

But there are some changes to get used to, says Johnson. “We’re going to continue our NASCAR-style pitstops, but you can’t work on the car ’til it’s fueled,” he confirms. Opposite to NASCAR, the engine cannot be left on during fuelling for safety reasons, and no work can be done at that time – not even tyre changes.

“There’s procedural changes that we’ve been adapting to, and we’ve been trying to implement those processes during all of our test sessions.”

Another idiosyncrasy of NASCAR racing is that cars don’t have doors – drivers have to slink through the window to get into or out of the car.

“We’re fully in and out of the window,” Button confirms. Drilling through driver changes until it becomes routine has been a unique task – as NASCAR races are typically run with just one driver per car, not multiple drivers hopping in and out over the course of what is effectively a high-speed relay race.

“It’s definitely not easy – especially after a two-hour stint – to try and drag yourself out a window!”

And then there’s the sound of the Camaro’s 5.8-litre (358 cubic-inch), naturally aspirated V8 engine – which is as much a spectacle as the car or the pit stops or the star-studded driver line-up itself.

The roar of a large displacement V8 won’t please everyone, but it has been pleasing to many people’s ears – even in comparison to some other V8-powered GM offerings, like the Cadillac V-Series.R prototype that’s vying for overall honours, or the Chevrolet Corvette C8.R that’ll race for the win in the GTE Am class.

How excited is Johnson to drop the hammer, down the long straightaways of Les Hunaudières, and the blistering run from Mulsanne to Indianapolis Corner? He summons his inner Bart Scott and says with a smile: “Can’t wait.”

“When the fans hear this car come by – it’s a proper V8 noise, and I think it’s really gonna wake some people up that are out there in the forest, or in their tents. It’s gonna make a lot of noise.”

Button can back this up – just the sheer volume of the Camaro exhausts him over long stints at the wheel. And he’s at peak physical fitness. “I had to get new earplugs, it’s so loud.”

“The best thing for me is when they start it up, though,” he adds. “It will blow everyone’s mind, the sound of it – it is insane.”

“You think the Cadillac is impressive? This thing – it’ll rock your world!”

And it’ll be hard for the other competitors not to take notice. “All the drivers are going to hate us because they’re not going to be able to sleep!” Button laughs.

Times from this past Sunday’s test sessions exceeded Johnson’s expectations in the prior days. He expected the Camaro to be at best, middle of the pack of the other GTE Am cars which are built to be agile and handle the sweeping curves that segment the long stretches of straight country roads.

Instead, Rockenfeller pumped out a time that was more than two seconds faster than what the fastest pros in the GTE Am Porsches, Ferraris, Aston Martins – or the lone Corvette – could manage!

Without any other cars to compete against in his class, Johnson is keeping the expectations modest out of the Garage 56 camp, saying: “We want to make sure we run a full 24 hours and put as many miles in as we can.” Fair enough.

But what will seem even stranger is that when all 24 hours of the race have finished, the Garage 56 Camaro won’t be classified with the other 61 cars. In other words, it can run more laps than anyone but it cannot win the race no matter how long it drives compared to the other cars in the other classes.

There’s just one problem – try telling world-class drivers like Johnson, Button, or Rockenfeller that it’s impossible to win a race when all they’ve ever lived for is the thrill of victory.

“There is a finishing order at the end of this thing,” says Johnson. “So if that is the case, and we have cars to race… it’d be nice to work our way into that somehow if things work out as we think.”

As the president of IMSA, Doonan has been working together with ACO President Fillon to promote the entirety of sports car racing around the world. “Pierre Fillon and I spoke at a dinner since arriving, and it [the reception to the NASCAR Garage 56 entry] brought home that we continue to celebrate convergence, we continue to celebrate what endurance means. It makes me happy and proud,” Doonan said.

So yes, the Garage 56 NASCAR racer is something of an oddity. It’s a novelty. But it’s a crowd-pleaser, one that has driven legitimate interest from people who otherwise wouldn’t have even thought to watch the 24 Hours of Le Mans – and that brings a smile to Doonan’s face – as well as the faces of every person involved in this special car’s development.

“My biggest satisfaction comes from seeing all these guys realise the fruits of their labour,” Doonan beams. “Many of them have never been out of the country, let alone been to Le Mans. So to see them get out of the country and be sponges, that’s the most satisfying thing to me.”

Before it even takes the green flag, this car has become a fan-favourite and created a permanent legacy in endurance racing. There’s a feeling that both the future of endurance racing, and stock car racing, will benefit from the lessons learned in the NASCAR Garage 56 project. Any results on top of that are merely a bonus.

This car has already achieved a lot of what it was set out to accomplish. To put smiles on the faces of racing fans from France to America and many other reaches of the world.

It’s a beautiful thing. Even a jaded young man who grew up in NASCAR country, desperate to seek other forms of racing wherever he could as a youth, can appreciate how big this is, and what it could mean for the future.

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