Colin Braun has landed his first task for 2020.
He will be racing for the DragonSpeed team in LMP2 at the Daytona 24 Hours at the Daytona International Speedway.
Braun has great experience with the ORECA chassis, that the team will run. He did the full 2018 season at CORE autosport in an ORECA 07 Gibson, where he managed to grab Pole Position and two race wins together with Jon Bennett. The pairing finished second in the Championship, only three points shy of Whelen Engineering with Felipe Nasr and Eric Curran in a DPi car.
CORE autosport chose to upgrade to a Nissan DPi car for 2019, which had previously been raced by ESM. That was a really tough switch, in a season plagued by technical issues and a few driver errors from Bennett. They did however also grab a single Pole Position at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park. The team chose to shut down their prototype activities at the end of the season, leaving Braun without a job for 2020.
He kind of still hasn’t found one, since the deal with DragonSpeed is for Daytona only so far, where he will share the car with Ben Hanley, Henrik Hedman, and a yet unnamed fourth driver. Even though the car will do a full LMP2 season, it will just be Hanley and Hedman pairing up for all races. So there is no space for Braun throughout the season, but only potentially at the other long races at Sebring, Watkins Glen and Road Atlanta – Petit Le Mans.
So it will be interesting to see where else Braun will pop up – because DragonSpeed do have a European programme in the European Le Mans Series too, with just Ben Hanley confirmed so far.
The test ahead of the Daytona 24 Hours will run on 3-5 January 2020.