The fire suffered by DeltaWing Racing at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park forced the team to skip the race due to the severity of the damage, yet the Georgia-based outfit is hard at work preparing a new DWC13 coupe chassis slated to make its TUDOR United SportsCar Championship return next month.

Originally conceived as an Indy car by the Chip Ganassi Racing team and designer Ben Bowlby, the closed-top sports car version of the DeltaWing will miss its first chance to compete at Indianapolis – in any form – during Friday’s Brickyard Grand Prix, and is now scheduled to race at Road America on August 10 and the season-ending Petit Le Mans on Oct. 4.

With the unexpected downtime required to prepare a new car, team manager Tim Keene told RACER the exercise could have long-term benefits.

“Unfortunately, the fire got the tub and the rear bulkhead area pretty good,” he said. “We’re having a new tub made as a spare. Some of the bodywork got damaged as well, so that took all of our spares so we’re have new ones made. Also, I’m still fairly new here and it brings to light other areas of the car as well for review. For example, looking at the doors, structurally, they need to be redone and they made driver changes more difficult. We’re working on things like that and having a better look at everything that’s being put on the car. We’re starting with a clean sheet of paper.”

Keene’s review of the DWC13 will result in a number of significant changes for next season as many of the items have development periods that will extend beyond the 2014 TUDOR Championship calendar. The new chassis being readied for Road America will be a carbon copy of the car that appeared at CTMP.

“There’s nothing that’s out of reach – in the long-term, we have a new gearbox being designed,” Keene continued. “We’re working with EMCO and Dan Cota on that, and that’s been going on before I joined officially. Really, everything from the rear bulkhead back is being treated with a clean sheet of paper. Whether it’s engine mounts and how it mounts.

“The funky rear suspension, which is like a pullrod/pushrod system – we’re going to a conventional pushrod arrangement that’s more common and less complicated. The car’s fairly well-balanced, so we’re trying to keep the geometries all the same, so that’s a work in progress. We’re able to accomplish all of this, and having a partner like EMCO to help us with some of this undertaking is a huge help. It’s going to be interesting to see it all when it’s packaged together.”

The original, lightweight DeltaWing gearbox design is still being used with the DWC13, and despite its tidy packaging, has been a limiting factor for the car as horsepower figures have increased. Using a Mazda-derived 350hp 1.9-liter 4-cylinder turbo to propel the coupe has increased the car’s performance, but putting that power to the ground has been an ongoing challenge.

Running with an open differential prior to CTMP meant the DeltaWing left a fair amount of acceleration behind in slow corners, and even with the addition of a new limited-slip diff to solve the problem, a new transmission has been needed to handle the engine’s output.

“We’re not able to use all of the resources because originally the gearbox wasn’t built strong enough,” Keene added. “So we’re leaving quite a bit off the table, and once we have a proper gearbox for it, quite a few people will be surprised. From the rear bulkhead forward, there won’t be a lot of changes, but we’re hoping to have all of the rear changes, the gearbox, suspension, some other stuff like relocating the turbo, doing some different things with the exhaust – our goal is to start testing everything by the first part of December.”

The DeltaWing team has been working on the replacement DWC13 from a new shop built on Don Panoz’s Elan Technologies compound, and will also assemble the next-generation DWC13 from within the facility as the team prepares for the 2015 season. As the leader of Ganassi’s championship-winning sports car program prior to joining the DeltaWing squad, Keene saw the original DeltaWing come to fruition under Bowlby’s direction, and with the project now in his hands, he says the polarizing car has more speed and potential waiting to be revealed.

“To be honest, this is the only true prototype in the series right now,” he noted. “We aren’t really limited by the rules, and people either love it or hate it, but it’s the only real prototype running [in IMSA] that isn’t locked into place and can evolve. It’s something very unique and it’s fairly quick. My kids loved it the first time they saw it, and I know there’s a lot more to come from the car as it continues to be developed.”​