Carrying the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship Prototype points lead into Watkins Glen – the pivotal mid-season endurance race in Upstate New York, has VisitFlorida.com Racing team owner Troy Flis feeling optimistic about their title chances.

His No. 90 Corvette DP has been a model of consistency in 2015 as drivers Richard Westbrook and Michael Valiante (BELOW) have captured four podiums from five rounds, including a win at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. Ties with fellow Corvette DP runners Action Express Racing with 156 points in the Drivers’ and Teams’ standings, the program-formerly-known-as Spirit of Daytona Racing is locked into a solid groove ahead of Sunday’s Sahlen’s Six Hours at the Glen.

“If somebody tells you at the beginning of the year you would be leading the championship halfway through the year, you would sign up right then and there…I’m pretty happy,” Flis told RACER. “I think we’ve got some good races coming up that we’re strong at. The ones that we aren’t so strong at, we got through. I’m pretty excited. I think we’ve got a good chance to get this championship.”

The VisitFlorida.com Racing team has always been fast, and has earned select victories throughout the years, but championship-winning consistency has been their Achilles heel. It’s too early to declare the inconsistencies are gone for good, but the team’s form in 2015 definitely suggests they’ve turned the corner.

“We came into this year and our goal to be on the podium every weekend, and we did that the first four events,” Flis said. “We were disappointed to finish fifth at Detroit because we had a podium car there and it just didn’t work out. I said, hey, if that’s our worst finish of the year, I’m, we can win the championship. But the competition is as strong as ever. One thing about Prototype teams is they don’t leave anything on the table. They make us race for everything we get.”

Most teams lacking consistency would look to restructure its crew, and possibly replace one or more of its drivers, but Flis has chosen to keep the team intact and focus on extracting better results. So far, his faith has been rewarded.

“We try to keep building and building upon what we’ve got,” he noted. “I hate change and sometimes you have to do change, but we have good people, we had people that knew our program and knew what we needed to get through. We just had to go about the season differently.

“Our crew and everything has done a great job all year. It was really cool to see the guys really pulled it together and I was really happy to see everybody click. That’s part of it, this sport is so team related. We’ve got really good mechanics, we’ve got really good engineering, and our drivers are fantastic. Everything is working the way it should.”

Looking ahead to Sunday’s race, and the other four races left to run this year, Flis is confident his team can come away with the championship when the checkered flag waves at Petit Le Mans in October.

“We don’t need to be gambling as much as we had to in the past years to try to make up ground,” Flis explained. “We’re just going to plug along. We’re going to keep doing what we are doing. We’re going to test again before the Canadian race, so we’re excited about that, and we have some work to do on our car for Road Atlanta, but we’ll test for that track, too. I’m hoping we could pull it off and get this championship that I always wanted.”