26/01/2022
So after some days to recover and reflect, here's my summary of how our 12 hour race at Spa went on Saturday...
First of all coming 6th overall this is a huge improvement on our first attempt. There was some hope of maybe doing better (there always is) but we were actually a little bit surprised by the pace of the leading cars and how they'd improved also since last time out. 4 laps down on the winning car over 12 hours of racing is not a particularly big gap, and in my own runs in Stints 1 and 3 I was actually only lapped by the lead car once, the first stint I finished on the lead lap.
Qualifying was a big eye-opener as to the pace of the leading cars. My best of a 2.14.5 would have put me right at the front of the previous event, and was a huge improvement over my own previous efforts, but the quality of the grid meant that pole position was a frankly ridiculous 2.13.2! I was 7 tenths of a second off the position ahead, so even with a inch-perfect lap and maybe a half second improvement, I was still off those leading cars. It was very impressive even if then a little disheartening!
Andy did a great job of coming into our team effort late and getting used to the car and our strategy, bringing his average laptimes down quite significantly in a short space of time. In his first stint it seemed he struggled initially to get into a rhythm but once he found it his pace was solid and with very few mistakes. He did have a big off towards the very end of the race at Eau Rouge which required an earlier pitstop to repair the damage, but we actually managed to work it out that he would only need fuel to make the end of the race and not tyres, which made his extra stop shorter and kept track position over another car that he was racing on-track. In our race voice chat we had the calculators out and everything to make the fuel calculations and work out pit stop times!
As for my own race, for the most part it was actually a little bit lonely on track. I was kind of stuck between not being quite quick enough to keep up with the leading pack of 5 cars, but also quick enough to pull away from the other half of the field. This made keeping a consistent pace quite easy in some aspects as there was little time lost to battling other cars. The Mercedes and Corvette that finished ahead of me in Stint 1 were really only a few tenths of a second a lap quicker, but as that adds up it left a 30-odd second gap at the end of the 3 hour stint.
The 3rd Stint of the race was my 2nd, and it began with some really poor conduct from another competitor, the THG #32 Aston Martin. Three times in the early laps he hit me trying to make passes that were from too far back and we even went as far as reporting his behaviour to the race direction. Eventually things settled down and I was able to get on with my race properly, again finding myself inbetween the two packs of the race. It was such a relief to cross the finish line and know I didn't need to drive again after 6 hours of racing in a 9 hour period, just hoping that I'd done enough to help Andy have best opportunity to secure that 6th place we were now aiming for.
As a team we had a great time preparing for this race and even as my 2nd entry in the race I still learned so much that I'll take forward into the next event from these guys which will be in April with a 12 hour race at the Mount Panorama Circuit instead!
