Q&A with Laura Wontrop Klauser: GM Sports Car Racing Program Manager

The BLOCK: In a broad perspective, why is it important for GM brands to be involved in the highest levels of sports car racing?

Laura Klauser: Racing is pretty critical at GM for a couple of reasons. One is to spread the word about our great products. When you have cars like the Corvette or the Cadillac V-Series, you have these really great performing cars and you want to show the world that we can take our technology to the racetrack and beat competitors that we're competing against in the showroom as well. So it's an opportunity for us to expose people to our brands and get them interested in the vehicles that we're selling.

It (racing) also gives us a way to work on technology for our vehicles. It's not a one-for-one anymore, you're not taking the exact same car that you're buying and putting it on the racetrack. You can see that with the Cadillac, where clearly we don't sell an LMDh Cadillac in the showroom. But there are different features on the vehicle that come back to production, along with how we tune the vehicle. We've done a lot of technology exchange using simulation work to make our tools better, and production can use them as they're developing the production cars as well. Racing feeds back into that.

Then, we also use racing as a way to develop our people and to give GM a home team to root for. There are many, many people that work for General Motors and we're very proud to represent that. We're proud to represent the United States of America when we race in the WEC, so we want to be able to show what our company and what our country can do.

TB: You oversee multiple classes and multiple series that compete around the world. How do you personally handle the challenge of overseeing all of that day-to-day?

LK: I have an incredible team that works with me and I'm very privileged to have been able to hand-select them. I could not say enough good things about the people that work in sports car racing, both under me directly in motorsports competition, and then on our engine platform side under Russ O'Blenes. They are great and they all are why the cars are so good.

They also make it so we can basically divide and conquer. There is quite a lot going on between two very big platforms, actually technically three very big platforms because we're still racing the GTE Corvette as we're designing and developing the GT3 Corvette. Then we have the Cadillac out there as well. So it's really having a good team and knowing that's how you can be in multiple places at once, by having good people representing in all those places.

TB: With IMSA having already gone to a GT3-spec car and WEC doing so next year, how does that change the Corvette Racing program as a whole, along with the brand's approach to building the Z06 road car, knowing there will be a race car version?

LK: In terms of the racing, the big change is that we are getting into customer racing with the platform. For the past 20-plus years we've had a factory team that's been racing two Corvettes and has done a phenomenal job. But GT racing is now getting more into the customers, so we will have way more chassis out there racing with various teams across the world. That's been a huge undertaking, because it's one thing to design and build a race car – thankfully we have a lot of experience with that and we have a great technical partner in Pratt & Miller that we work with. 

However, the customer side of this and the support program that comes along with it has been new territory for us. We got our feet wet with it with our Camaro GT4 program, and I'd say we learned a lot, so we're trying to take all of the things that we know we need to improve on there and build from there. That's been a huge undertaking.

In terms of how we relate back to production, not much has changed. The car that's been racing since 2020 was developed as the C8 platform was being developed. They did the race car and the production car together, so the fundamentals were designed for racing and production at the same time. The new GT3 race car is built off of the Z06 platform, but it gets to take all of the great things that came originally from the (C8) base. Then we're able to improve upon things that we've learned for the past two-and-a-half years of racing the car and make it an even better race car. Then of course all this information gets fed back to production.

I think it's a lot of taking what's already really good and making it even better, and all of this learning will go into the Corvette production as a whole. It'll be there for when we look to maybe doing the next generation, or if we want to do another iteration or something along those lines, we'll have those lessons.

TB: Outside of wins or podiums, how do you measure success in your role with everything you oversee?

LK: That's a good question. The success on track is definitely helpful because it's easy to tell if you're doing a good job or not, but it's not the only bit to it. I think if you take Rolex for an example, we did not win that with the brand-new Cadillac, but we had probably the most reliable vehicle in the class. I would say that from that standpoint we did a hell of a job and that gave us that strong foundation.

Here at Sebring, again we're shooting to win. If we are able to finish the race again with a reliable package, if we're able to do something that gives us a little extra response on track where it makes something more efficient for the team, and we come out without a success, that's something that we'll look towards as well.

(Ed. note: The No. 31 Whelen Engineering Cadillac V-Series.R took the GTP class and overall win in the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring, while the No. 33 Corvette C8.R won the GTE Pro class in the 1000 Miles of Sebring.)

The main goal is to win, and then you look and see, okay, if we didn't achieve that, what did we achieve? Really just in general we want to make sure that the team is strong. We have a lot of people that are involved in this. If they're working together well, and they're able to progress forward, and they're not tripping over each other, I'd say that that's a huge success. When you have those things in place the wins and the podiums come with that.