It's been a long wait on the sidelines of the IVRA Endurance Championship for Prestanda NOMAD, Tom Stanley and Jason Dilworth lined up to drive our #322 Lamborghini Huracán GT3 Pro/Am entry at Watkins Glen today with engineering support from Xavier Brien.
Plenty of laps of practise for the drivers in the lead up lead to a strong qualifying performance, putting the car on P2 for the start. Unfortunately between qualifying and the race Jason suffered a power cut, but that didn't look to be a problem as everything was back to normal before the start – or so we thought! The formation lap started and there was no force feedback for the driver, and the decision was made to start from the pits. With the system reset and force feedback reinstated, we started dead last and 20 seconds back from P9, but at least in the race... until more drama in the early laps, with an Internet disconnect to add the bad luck.
After all was done, Tom had taken over the car and we were a lap down on the rest of the GT3 field. Despite some frustration there was still some positivity among the team, because the beauty of IVRA Endurance races is that there are always safety cars. With those safety cars come wave-bys, and the opportunity to gain back lost laps. So away Tom went, putting in solid lap after solid lap and waiting patiently for the inevitable to happen – except there was no safety car to be seen.
After a couple of hours of racing it was starting to become clear that safety cars were unlikely to happen and the team were going to need to do whatever we could on track – and that was looking like a couple of places at best. Tom finished his stints having brought the car up to P9, and then Jason took over again.
With Xavier's guidance the team started to try whatever they could to get something from the race. Good pace was helping, but not enough. We kept wishing for a safety car, when a car ended up on its roof and managed to roll itself back over to avoid triggered the safety car it seemed like the luck wasn't going to go our way. A new strategy was dreamt up which could give us a shot, and almost immediately a safety car was deployed for an incident at the inner loop chicane. Hurrah! Except that the way everything dropped meant that our car ended up with no opportunity to wave around and thus no opportunity to get the lap back... Back to plan C.
A last piece of luck came our way with a 2nd safety car with very little time to go in the race, and that all important wave around back onto the lead lap. A frantic last 10 laps saw the car move up from P6 to a final position of P4, which the whole team are very satisfied with. Clearly there was a lot of bad luck, but a clean race with no crashes for the team and a good recovery will always be a positive result. We're looking forward to the next two round of the championship.
