View the pre-race event details here
It was another race of two halves, like PEC round 1 recently, except this time the other way round: first half good, second half not so much. That was how it was for the first round of IVRA Endurance this year, with what ended up being a strong start to a championship season.
The #256 took out their Ferrari 296 GT3 car out for the first time in an endurance event with a decent amount of trepidation. We'd worked incredibly hard as a team to get the car into a place that felt reasonable as a race car, but the final free practice sessions weren't painting a massively positive picture of our potential.
Going into qualifying then, it was a pleasant surprise to find the car starting in P8 with a good set of laps from Daniel Gilding in his very first outing in an IVRA event for the team. A chaotic first lap first saw a bit of damage on the front of the car before we started, but then a number of moves and incidents for others left the car in P3 in class early on. Eyes were straight onto a strong result.
Not long into the first stint, though, the first disaster struck. Dan started to suffer hardware issues, with his VR headset providing him with around 10fps – not ideal. An early stop swapped us to Chris Chadderton to drive the next section of the race with an offset strategy.
A number of early safety cars paid off for the team, with a large amount of the next couple of hours spent in first position in the GT3 class and a strategy playing out that looked good to take the top position at the halfway mark and potentially beyond.
As we hit that halfway mark, though, a couple of teams also really fancied those halfway points going so far as to take it three wide into the first corner of the halfway lap. The inevitable contact happened, and after everything shook out we took second place at the halfway point. Unfortunately we also took a hefty bit of damage and a 10 second penalty into that second half.
With a positive first half out of the way and drive time ticking on, it was time for Dan to have his second go in the car, with everyone's fingers crossed that the hardware side was going to hold up. Unfortunately that wasn't to be though, and after another half hour or so of racing the problems reared up again. This time the team opted to swap out to our reserve Sapphire rated driver for the event, and Tom Stanley took to the wheel.
Soon after Tom's arrival in the car, there was another safety car and a bit of strategic brilliance gave an opportunity to fix our damage with minimal losses. This was executed well, but a mixup with race control gave the car a hefty penalty and a loss of a lap while working it out. These things happen, but it left the car with no way to fight for any positions late in the race. Tom drove brilliantly with consistent pace to the end, but no miracle safety cars came to the rescue, and we had to settle for a finish in 12th in class at the end.
Overall we can take this as a positive start to the season for the team, with a couple of cars we'd expect to see fighting for the championship having worse luck in the form of retirement. When you can take a decent haul of points from a bad race, that can bode well for the rest of the season and our championship hopes.
The next round of this series is the 1000km of Road Atlanta on the 28th October and all of the information for that will be available here as it is published.
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