A left-rear axle failure on a transporter truck turned into something far worse for DXDT Racing on Wednesday, igniting a fire substantial enough to knock the team’s No. 36 Corvette Z06.R out of Sunday’s IMSA round at Laguna Seca.
Program manager Bryan Sellers confirmed the damage to Sportscar365, calling the blaze “substantial.” The team simply could not get a spare chassis from its headquarters to the California circuit in time. A mechanical failure on a highway became a logistics nightmare that erased weeks of preparation.
The withdrawal stings more than a typical missed weekend. DXDT arrived at Laguna Seca with momentum, having started on pole at the most recent IMSA round in Long Beach. Robert Wickens opened that race and led the GTD class early before handing the car to co-driver Mason Filippi, who brought it home sixth after contact with another competitor.
Now the rhythm breaks. And for Wickens, it breaks harder than for anyone else on the crew.
The Canadian former IndyCar driver, who has been rebuilding a racing career after a 2018 crash at Pocono left him partially paralyzed, only competes in IMSA’s sprint rounds. He does not run the endurance events. The GTD pro-am class skips the Detroit round entirely later this month, and the next event at Watkins Glen is a six-hour race where Filippi will run with DXDT’s dedicated endurance co-drivers.
That math is cruel. Wickens won’t get back behind the wheel of the Corvette until the sprint race at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, his home round. One axle failure on a truck, and a driver who has already fought harder than most just to strap into a race car loses another month of seat time.
DXDT says it expects to return at Watkins Glen with its full operation intact and continue through the remainder of the IMSA season. The fire damaged the transporter and car but apparently did not destroy the program’s long-term viability. Sellers sounded confident about the path forward even as this weekend slipped away.
Hauler fires are not unheard of in professional motorsport, but they remain rare events that can devastate smaller teams without the depth of factory-backed operations. DXDT, a Georgia-based independent outfit, runs a lean program. Losing a weekend means lost track time, lost data, lost points, and a disruption to the driver combinations the team was beginning to gel.
Filippi, who races full-time in the series, will at least get his next start at Watkins Glen. The continuity loss falls disproportionately on Wickens, who measures his season in a handful of carefully chosen appearances. Every one counts.
The fire started with something as mundane as a truck axle. Nobody crashed. Nobody made a strategic error. The race car may not have even been damaged beyond repair.
But the calendar does not care about the cause. It only knows that DXDT’s Corvette will not be on the grid at Laguna Seca, and Wickens will not race again until June at the earliest. Sometimes the hardest part of a comeback is not the injury or the adaptation. It is the waiting.
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