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With a month passed since round one, preparation has been in full flow for round two of the IVRA Endurance championship. Especially useful was the recent iRacing Special Event with mostly the same cars at Road Atlanta for their Petit Le Mans event.
As it turned out, that "practice" event didn't go brilliantly for our driver pairing for this event. Chris Chadderton and Ayden Refaie were victims of traffic early on, and they were hoping not to bring that bad luck through to the IVRA event.
As always in the GT3 class, it fell to the Sapphire rated driver to qualify and start the race. Ayden did a brilliant job to put the car in 6th position in class, with a time rivalling some of the Pro class cars out there. Not bad for his first effort in IVRA Endurance!
That strong qualifying performance was carried into the first stint, with Ayden keeping the car completely clean around tricky traffic situations. The GTP class cars have such a massive speed difference that it takes a lot of respect from everyone involved to keep contact to a minimum, and that was definitely happening early in the race.
Chris swapped in for the second stint and continued the great work, with the car moving up the standings consistently through his stint to a high of 3rd position. Luckily that 3rd position was timed with the halfway point of the race, where important points are awarded.
At the end of Chris' stint, the first of what turned out to be 4 safety car periods came out and Ayden was switched back in to get the required number of laps in.
From there the race became a bit of a mess for everyone involved – the respect between classes shown earlier in the race seemed to erode, and safety cars came thick and fast. With an ever changing strategy situation, we made a couple of mistakes that had an impact on the race.
The outcome of all that was that the car was at the back of the pack coming out of the final safety car, and carrying a little damage. Chris had plenty of pace and, despite sitting in 5th position, had a good chance of fighting with the group of cars in 2nd-4th ahead. Unfortunately a PaceWorx eSports car, 10 laps down in the race, was between us and that fight and was a lot less than helpful. In the end we could only settle to finish in that 5th position.
5th position, and 3rd at halfway, was a result we'd have been happy with before the race. To be disappointed with it just shows how competitive the team can be in this series when the strategy and luck fall the way we hope they will in future rounds.
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