Why a Le Mans winner is heading into the “unknown world” of NASCAR

It's not often that a wide-eyed rookie starting 30th in a second-tier NASCAR Xfinity race will draw so much as a passing comment beyond hardened followers of the series looking to uncover future Cup Series stars. It's certainly uncommon for such a description to fit a Porsche factory driver and two-time Le Mans 24 Hour winner.

But on the Daytona road course this Saturday, 2017 World Endurance Champion Earl Bamber will trade the 911 RSR he normally races in the IMSA Sportscar Championship's GTLM class for the #21 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet Camaro and become the latest in a long line of drivers to be assigned the label of a NASCAR 'road-course ringer'.

The Kiwi, a winner at Le Mans in 2015 and '17 in the fearsome 919 HYBRID, is a self-confessed NASCAR fan who admits he has a season-pass to stream every race live. His NASCAR debut has been a long time in the works, having tested on a short oval with Childress as long ago as 2007, when he was racing in Formula Renault and still a long way from being the established professional he is today.

"I've known Richard now going back 13 years and we've always tried to put something together," Bamber tells Autosport. "It got close a couple of years ago but now finally we've found that we can do the Daytona road course to begin with, hopefully we can go alright and it leads into some more stuff.

"The original plan was to do Mid-Ohio this year but with the whole COVID thing it got moved to Daytona, which I think is even better.

"I really like the racing, it's some of the hardest in the world and it's also quite interesting because it's something that not many people ever try either. It's sort of like this almost unknown world to most guys from Europe."

With no practice or qualifying - the grid has been set by a new metric weighing up team's points, the car's finishing position and fastest lap in the last race - and testing strictly limited, Bamber's first laps of the car will be in the race itself. That would be enough to faze most, but the six-time Daytona 24 Hours starter says "it's actually really cool".

"It requires a certain skill level, you can't do it by repetitive practice," he says. "They're super-strict with the testing ban, so we've been spending a lot of time in the simulator because we're literally going to roll off [in the race].

"It's this whole different world where they are completely used to it week-in, week-out but I'm not used to it at all. There's a huge amount to learn" Earl Bamber

"You've got to have good notes and good previous experience with how you're going to set-up the car to roll off too, which I think holds more to drivers that have got experience. But I'm really looking forward to the challenge, I like to test the waters in different stuff and it's going to be one of the hardest things to learn that I've done."

Bamber does at least have prior experience of jumping into situations blind. In 2010, he was supposed to be commentating on a round of the football club-themed Superleague Formula series in Ordos, but ended up subbing at FC Porto when a visa issue sidelined regular driver Alvaro Parente and won the five-lap super final.

But even if the V12-powered beasts were the fastest cars he'd driven at that point in his career, as he points out, it was still a single-seater. By contrast, he has no barometer for NASCAR, which he expects will be "somewhere in the middle between a Trans-Am and a V8 Supercar" - having raced in a Red Bull Holden in the latter category with Triple Eight alongside fellow Kiwi Shane van Gisbergen in the 2018 endurance rounds - and has been at the RCR workshop "asking questions flat out" to familiarise himself with the little details that in IMSA are second-nature.

"Even simple things like pitlane speed limit, it's all done manually so getting used to the light sequences and stuff like that," he says. "It's this whole different world where they are completely used to it week-in, week-out but I'm not used to it at all. There's a huge amount to learn."

One man who knows all about the challenge of jumping in cold is one-time Champ Car race-winner Alex Tagliani, a regular 'ringer' in NASCAR road course events with the likes of Team Penske, Brad Keselowski Racing and Kyle Busch Motorsports, who has landed a Truck Series drive this weekend in KBM's #51 Toyota Tundra.

The 47-year-old Canadian, who took pole for the 2011 Indianapolis 500, doesn't think Bamber's prior circuit knowledge will be much help. He too has track experience, having made two starts in the 24 Hours in 2007 and 2014, but says he would happily swap that for more Truck mileage.

Recalling his first Nationwide outing at Montreal for Penske, where he was 21s per lap slower than his Champ Car pole lap in 2003, he tells Autosport: "It can be very confusing to take whatever you know from a track from a different car. I'm more nervous going to Daytona than basically anything else because the last thing I remember from Daytona is something that you can't do with a NASCAR Truck!

"You have to forget about all the feelings you've learned on various different tracks from those types of cars. You have to turn the switch off and start with a fresh mind. It's quite easy to get sucked in to try to do something because you've done it before, but it could be a disadvantage to know the track with a different car."

Even by comparison with IMSA, where racing between the all-professional GTLM outfits is ultra-close, Bamber will also have to be prepared for an altogether different style of racecraft in NASCAR than he is used to.

Tagliani says his approach has always been to avoid making enemies, with respect for "the competitors, the crowd, the series, the sponsors and the team" his first consideration rather than driving for the win at any cost. He doesn't name him, but that was a strategy which did 1997 Formula 1 world champion Jacques Villeneuve no favours in his nine incident-strewn appearances in the then Nationwide Series between 2008 and 2012.

"I think it was the right approach," Tagliani (below) says. "I didn't make any waves, I didn't really make any enemies, I didn't do too many things wrong, so people have confidence to put me in their vehicle. But if you go there and you're thinking that you're bigger than everybody, the team and the sport in general, it's going to be a short-lived situation."

Tagliani has shown plenty of speed in his cameo outings, with four Xfinity series pole positions to his name from eight starts, but is testament to the fact that results in NASCAR are hard to come by. He has finished second four times, but a first win has proved frustratingly elusive.

That is partly down to plain bad luck - running out of fuel on the final lap at Road America in 2014, he restarted 23rd for the Green-White-Checkered two-lap dash to the flag, overtaking 22 cars to finish second - while on other occasions series regulars took a literal attitude to the Good Ol' Boys mantra that 'rubbing is racing'.

At Road America in 2016, having qualified on pole, he was leading with 16 laps to go when a lunge from Michael McDowell knocked him off and put him back in the pack. But the one that really stung was Mid-Ohio 2015, when Regan Smith punted him out of the lead on the final corner with a move that even the most optimistic British Touring Car Championship racer would expect to earn sanction for.

"When people are looking at ringers always being at an advantage, I think sometimes people don't realise some of the disadvantages we have to go through" Alex Tagliani

"The big mistake that I did is thinking that he was never going to drive me the way I drove him," recalls Tagliani. "Early in the race on a pitstop, I lost the position but I was quicker than him. I drove I think it was 14 laps behind him, I calculated my move and I passed him on the inside of Turn 3. It was super-clean, I wanted to take my time to do it right and respect his championship.

"But if I knew he was going to drive me like that, I could have hit him way earlier in the race and I would have taken the lead and he would have been in the sandtrap, and I would have won easily. When I talked to other people they said 'we saw it coming', my mistake was always thinking you're safe."

Therein lies one of the issues Bamber will face in addition to his learning curve - while he will be playing his way into the race and looking to pick up as much knowledge as possible, there will be little by way of repercussion if his rivals get physical.

"That's the real big disadvantage of being a ringer or being a one-timer," says Tagliani. "You have to provide more respect towards others and they might not have to do it. But you cannot retaliate, you cannot do anything. You're basically quite exposed, so this is a huge disadvantage.

"You're not there the next weekend, so they forget about you, they don't care about you. You're going to be gone and they might not see you for maybe another year or so, and at that point it doesn't matter, everything goes. When people are looking at ringers always being at an advantage, I think sometimes people don't realise some of the disadvantages we have to go through.

"It's not just a question of winning at any cost. The #51 team has a mission, they want to win the championship and you need to go there like you're the full-season driver and drive like it's not that it's your only opportunity."

All of which means Bamber is firmly up against it this weekend but, ever the competitor, he says he would be "happy with a top-three", citing the standard of machinery underneath him from the reigning Xfinity Series champions. That sounds like a lofty ambition, but he knows the stage format used in NASCAR can play in his favour by affording him plenty of chances to reset the balance in his favour.

"Stage one is just about going out and rolling around and getting used to the car," he says. "For us the goal should be to be prepared to roll off in the top five for the final stage and see if we can have a go at it.

"It's not as if we need to go out and win stage one and two. I think stage one and two is just learning and then we'll see what we've got. I think the main competition is Austin Cindric, AJ Allmendinger and Chase Briscoe, also [multiple Daytona 24 class-winner] Andy Lally is there, so the goal would be to try and run up there with those guys.

"It's nice too that nobody has ever driven there before, so everyone is going to be exploring their way. I'm looking forward to it and feel very lucky to get into immediately really good equipment from RCR, it's been quite a while since a road-course ringer has got into such good equipment straight away."

It also comes at a potentially crucial juncture in Bamber's career. Porsche will withdraw from IMSA GTLM at the end of the year and, while Weissach has admitted to exploring the new LMDh rule set that is due on-stream in 2022, no firm commitment has been forthcoming. Bamber makes no secret that he would like this weekend to lead to future outings - with the NASCAR/IMSA double-header on the Charlotte roval in October already on his radar. But could it be anything more permanent?

"The main goal is to be in something that's one of the hardest championships in the world," he says of his future. "GTLM or GTE is one of the toughest things there was outside of LMP1 because you still had open tyre development during the homologation cycles and you have full factory teams.

"RCR is still what you'd call a private team and they're at a similar size to what we had in the Porsche LMP1 team when you look at the engine side, chassis and manufacturing and stuff like that" Earl Bamber

"It's a shame that IMSA stopped, so I'll be hunting for something like that again. I don't want to sit back and do something easy, I want to be challenged and that's also why I'm going to do NASCAR because it's super-challenging, super-interesting.

"Everyone says that they're under-developed stock cars but if you ever look at the manpower and resource that they have, it's absolutely phenomenal. RCR is still what you'd call a private team and they're at a similar size to what we had in the Porsche LMP1 team when you look at the engine side, chassis and manufacturing and stuff like that.

"It's a huge amount of resourcing power to make these cars go fast, and even for Porsche, there are some things they don't do that we do and there are somethings they do that we don't do."

It may 'only' be the Xfinity Series, but there will be a lot of people tuning in on Saturday to follow his progress. It might just make that "unknown world" that bit more tangible.