Defending TUDOR United SportsCar Championship Prototype champions Action Express Racing spent time shaking down the 2015 version of its Corvette Daytona Prototype on Monday at Daytona International Speedway.

According to AXR driver Joao Barbosa, the new C7-bodied DP performed as expected, and for the second year in a row, AXR was the first Corvette DP program to begin testing in full trim for the upcoming season.

“Last year testing early paid off, and hopefully this year will be the same,” Barbosa (LEFT) told RACER. “The C7 body really isn’t much of a difference performance-wise from last year’s car; it’s mostly about the styling differences. It’s basically the same in most ways, except for the rear [tail]lights are a lot different and the area around them is changed Our paint scheme doesn’t show the differences—the subtle differences—very much, but I like it a lot.”

AXR was joined by a limited number of IMSA teams at Daytona on Monday, with GTD Porsches from Magnus Racing and Konrad Motorsport, the RG Racing Riley-BMW DP, and a few Ferrari Challenge cars sharing the 3.5-mile circuit. Compared to running flat out in search of ultimate lap times, Barbosa says the day was spent gathering data on Pratt & Miller’s C7 bodywork, a new ECU and throttle system for the 5.5-liter Chevy V8, and an electronic shifting system.

“We knew what to expect with the C7 body, but logged a lot of data on it, which was good, and the cool thing was we tried a paddle shifter for the first time, which we’ll use, for now,” he noted. AXR, compared to most of their DP rivals, stayed with manual shifting actuation throughout the 2014 season.

“It was, for us, the biggest part of the testing program,” Barbosa continued, “and there were some things we still need to work on—to improve, but we got a lot of data on everything so we can tweak some things and get it perfect the next time out at the Roar. We also tested a new ECU with fly-by-wire throttle, and that worked really good. Today was about getting miles on these new things so we don’t have any delays at the Roar.”

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Barbosa and teammate Christian Fittipaldi shared the driving duties today in the Co. 5 Corvette DP, and they’ll hand the Coyote-built chassis over to their Whelen Engineering teammates Eric Curran, Max Papis and Phil Keen to continue the test on Tuesday.

“We put some good miles on the car today, we stopped a lot to look at things, and we were the only fast DP there, so it was hard to compare lap times; it will take having more cars there to gauge our speed,” Barbosa added.

“We were happy with how the test went and to get a feeling for fly-by-wire and paddle shifting. We learned a lot, and now we’ll turn the car over to our teammates for tomorrow so they can get some miles in the car.”