After the announcement it was revealed that the car had previously run on track prior to being shipped to France, with the team having conducted a private test at Road America near Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin which was unknown to the media previously. Before the official reveal of the car, Team Co-Founder and Team Principal Adam Blocker had the following to say about his team’s new car: “FIRST of all, it’s a pleasure to be here in Le Mans – one of the truly sacred places in motorsport – to launch our 2024 challenger before testing the next few days. As most of you are probably familiar, FIRST has a recent tradition of naming every car after an influential American motorsports engineer or in this case engineers. This year, we’ve chosen to honor Leonard and Glen Wood of the famous Wood Brothers NASCAR operation. Leonard and Glen revolutionized motorsport in many ways including being credited with creating the first orchestrated pit stops, something that started a long series of events to give us the insanely fast pit stops in modern racing. As an added bonus for us and Ford, Leonard and Glen’s Wood Brothers team has exclusively used Ford brands since the 1950s, contributing 5 Daytona 500 wins and 99 NASCAR Cup wins to the Ford operation since inception. The brothers are American motorsports legends and we are proud to represent them and we hope that the Wood 24 represents that on the track.” With that, the covers were pulled off of the Wood 24: Blocker spoke about his outlook on the season and the team’s chances: “We’ve learned a lot from our struggles last season. And while we don’t think we will start the season where we want to be, we think by the end of 2024 or worst case the start of 2025 we will be regularly scoring points again as a team of our size and ability should be. Everyone in our camp is also super excited about the engine Ford has developed for this season (dubbed the Ford DB180C), we think the major architecture changes they have made in preparation for this season will make a big difference to our performance on track. Our trackside engineers and drivers have said this is the best engine they’ve seen from Ford yet, which honestly puts a lot of pressure on our chassis and aero guys to step up their game to do it justice! In terms of the rest of the team, we are obviously super excited to have one of the best drivers in FV history behind the wheel in Enrique Ruiz. Speaking of other elements that add pressure to the guys and girls that design and build the cars! I think I can speak on behalf of everyone though that we are all excited more than anything, because there will not be a question over our lead driver’s ability. If we give Enrique a car that is capable of winning races or scoring podiums, he will do just that. It’s up to us to make that happen.” Additionally, after the reveal in Le Mans images of the Wood 24 testing at Road America were leaked to the public. In the past, FIRST has opted to do car reveals during their initial shakedown runs but opted to hold what was presumably their shakedown run privately this season.
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