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Sunday
Race day! The plan is pretty simple, use the 30 minute warm up this morning to check the car is good and ready for the 6 hour race, then attack! We know the car is good and if we have the reliability then I think we could have a great result!!
Warm up was pretty bad. 10 minutes into the session and Paul was in the car circulating well. We got a call on the radio to say that he had stopped due to a total loss of drive! The car came back at the end of the session and it turns out the prop shaft was damaged. So lucky this happened now rather than 10 minutes into the race. That would have been a total disaster as the car needs to drive back to the pits under its own power for the car to be worked on! That would have been it.
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The car is all fixed up and ready for the Race. I’ll be starting. Got a bit of a plan for the start, think I should be able to make up a few spots early on and catch some of the other guys out at the start. We’ll see how it goes!!
So just got out of the car after my first hour and a half stint, was a really up and down time. I started sixth and managed to get up to third on the first lap! The car felt great, good enough to then spend the next 20 minutes catching the Modena 430 Ferrari driven by Jamie Melo. I caught him and got past pretty easily. We were the fastest GT2 car on track at that time and once past the Ferrari I was closing down on the leader.
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Coming into the final corner about 40 minutes into my stint I felt a soft rear tyre and made a pretty quick decision to pit the car. Turns out I was correct. The left rear had a puncture and I had pitted just in time but it did mean that we lost a lot of time to the leaders. We fueled the car and I was sent out for another hour and ten minutes.
Paul is now out in the car and doing great. I’ll be back in shortly. I’m hoping that I should be able to make up a few more spots during my stint; we’ll see how it goes!
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The stint went well. I managed to get the car up to sixth-place in class but there is a problem with the gearbox. The shifts are becoming very harsh and there is a huge amount of effort when changing up and down the gearbox. It seems to be stable but fingers crossed its all OK! Only a couple of hours to go now!
Just got news that Paul has lost drive. It turns out there has been another gearbox failure. At the moment we’re unsure of what exactly is the problem but it seems, with only a couple more hours to go, we’re out of the race from sixth-place. Pretty disappointing but we had a great start and really showed the other teams that we have made huge progress this weekend. For sure we were the fastest GT2 car on the track at quite a few occasions during the race which is great!
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Now I’m looking forward to next weekend and the first full test of the LMP1 car at Atlanta. We’ll be preparing for the 10 hour Petit Le Mans the following weekend! It’s going to be amazing!!
