The NASCAR Garage 56 program was a rousing success. The joint project between NASCAR, IMSA, Chevrolet, Hendrick Motorsports and Goodyear had the ambitious goal of taking a NextGen Cup Series car to the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Despite a transaxle failure, the No. 24 Chevy Camaro ZL1 stock car was able to cross the finish line after 24 hours.
We don’t know if we’ll see this special stock car race again, so let’s relive Garage 56’s journey through development and competition in France.
Seeing the Camaro screaming around Le Mans, it’s easy to forget the massive effort that went into the Garage 56 program. It was roughly 14 months from the initial Garage 56 announcement at the 2022 12 Hours of Sebring to its competitive outing at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
While changes were made for performance purposes, others weren’t made to the Camaro to bring the most authentic NASCAR experience to France. The Garage 56 entry didn’t feature doors like other cars in the race. Stock car racing has occasional driver changes to substitute an injured or ill driver with a replacement, but nowhere near the frequency of a 24-hour race.
The Garage 56 Camaro also wasn’t fitted with air jacks to easily lift the car during pit stops. The team’s pit crew had no issues using a manual floor jack. The crew actually beat every other GTE Am team and placed fifth overall in the annual pit stop challenge.
The most visually striking change made to the Garage 56 Chevy Camaro ZL1 was replacing the conventional headlight and taillight decals with functional lights. It sounds simple, but the stock cars needed multi-head lights to cut through the darkness at 200 miles per hour.
The Garage 56 Camaro had a 200 horsepower advantage over the cars in the GTE Am class. The stock car was over five seconds faster than any GTE car over a single lap. For safety reasons, the Camaro began the 24 Hours of Le Mans in front of the GTE Am class instead of in last place like previous Garage 56 efforts. The power difference is apparent at the race start, where the Camaro quickly pulls away down the start-finish straight.
Putting the lap times and the spec sheet aside, the Garage 56 Camaro is just cool. Here’s Jimmie Johnson during a restart down the Mulsanne Straight. Hearing a NASCAR Cup Series V8 engine roar down a French public road was something that only existed in my wildest dreams until last weekend.
The Garage 56 Camaro has captivated racing fans around the world, especially Americans. Plenty of patriotic edits have been made using onboard footage from the race. The best video has to be when the Camaro passed a prototype down the start-finish straight to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” along with an added clip from “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.”
I could honestly watch the Garage 56 Camaro going around the Circuit de la Sarthe forever. Here’s another clip of the stock car blasting down the Mulsanne, this time in the dark.
The Garage 56 Camaro didn’t have a perfect Le Mans. After sunrise, the stock car suffered a transaxle failure while exiting Indianapolis. The Camaro was able to be nursed back to the pit lane where the crew spent about an hour undergoing repairs before returning to the race.
The Garage 56 Camaro did cross the finish line after 24 hours, finishing 39th overall out of 62 starters. The Camaro might not have beaten all of the cars in the GTE Am class, but its outing at Le Mans was undoubtedly unforgettable.