What started as the race we would probably suck at, resulted in our best result of this season.
In practice we couldn’t get pace into the car. We tried every possible angle on setup, but it felt like we were lacking a lot of downforce everywhere. Also this race we could only practice and race with Bob and me, as the rest were unavailable. Less drivers means less input on the setup, and thus made us struggle a lot with setting the car up for the quali and race. Bob eventually came with a setup of thursday before the race that, with a few tweaks of mine, felt good enough to race with, but we both knew it wasn’t fast.
Qualifying went as expected, as in quali practice I saw I was 0.5s offpace. In the end I drove a 13th time, and I was at a loss on how to gain time, as it was one of my best laps of the week.
Raceday wasn’t much different, and Bob was about 0.5s a lap faster than me, so we decided he should start the race. We found one positive point on raceday practice, and that was that we could manage 37 – 38 laps on a full tank of fuel, and our calculations told us we could manage with only 5 fuelstops for the whole 6 hours.
Bob started and immediately started to save fuel. He sat quite a few laps behind Jakob from IRDK, but had a feeling he could drive faster than him. After some 15 laps to go in his stint he managed to overtake him, and could manage a small gap. He did notice that his tires were going off, and he couldn’t drive the times he drove before. He still did great with the fuelsaving, and we saw everyone in front of us pit whereas Bob managed to do 38 laps. Pitstop went fine, and we came back on track just behind TeamGT and DFTBA. Both were too fast for us at the time, so Bob did what he was doing before the pitstop and save fuel. A bit less this time, but enough to drive 37 laps. Both IRDK and Atomic had problems (one spun and the other pc trouble) so we gained 2 places. But we were still well out of the top 10 at that moment. Still we saw that we were probably the only team trying to do a 5 stop race, were the rest would need an additional stop. This could get us back into the fight at the end of the race. And an exciting end it would be….
Just before the end of Bob’s 2nd stint JCL missed the braking point at the last chicane, and hit Bob on the left rear. We had 35s optional repairs, but the car still felt ok. 2 laps later after driving 75 laps in total Bob pitted for the second time, and now it would be me to drive 2 stints. We still hadn’t decided at that point who would drive the last stint, as it seemed at that time that my pace wouldn’t be good enough.
During Bob’s last stint I finally saw where I was losing my time. My exit out of the arena was slow, as I could get into the throttle a lot earlier if I adjusted my entry into turn 4, and I braked to hard before the backstraight, losing another 0.2s. Somehow in the race it clicked, and gained almost a whole second vs. my practice times before the race. And I did it while still saving enough fuel to do a 37 lap stint.
My 2 stints went without much drama, my pace was good, actually even a bit faster than Bob, so we decided I would drive the last stint as well. In my 2nd stint we were a bit worried that I would need an additional lap, so I saved a bit more fuel, but in the end it wasn’t needed.
My 3th stint started the same as the stints before, steady pace, no real drama, and we still had a chance on a good end result, as there were still quite a few teams in front of us that needed to make an extra stop.
DFTBA was the first one to stop in front of us, after that Shinya Michimi and Atomic also made their stops and ended up behind us. As we believed they would probably stop without taking tires, we also would have better tires for the last bit, and I managed to increase the gap to the ones behind me.
Last one to make a stop was MSP Drivers Home #83, and they exited just a couple of seconds behind me, and I knew this could be getting close. Had a bit of trouble with the traffic in that lap, but kept a gap of around 2.5s seconds. In the next laps I was slowly increasing the gap, and I got to about a 4 second lead.
With a bit more than 4 laps to go disaster struck. Don’t know if it was the pressure from behind, or just a stupid mistake, but I got very loose in the last chicane, and got on the grass on the exit. I just managed to keep the car straight on the grass, and drive back to the track, but the gap to MSP was now less than 1s. I knew I could drive a bit faster than Jan-Eric in the MSP car, but that advantage would be gone with the draft he got from me. This would become very interesting and nerve wracking laps… Until the last lap he didn’t really had any chance to make a move. Then the last lap came. I can tell you how it went, but a video is better than words…
I don’t know how big the gap was at the line, but for me it was big enough. P7 !! When we started at P13 we couldn’t have hoped for this. Our best scenario would be P9 or P10, but this was like a racewin for us. I think all my neighbours heard it when I crossed the line when all the nerves, joy and adrenaline exploded into screaming 
My wife came looking if everything was allright
What a great last lap it was. Thanks Jan-Eric for the great fight. I hope we can have many more like that.
Thanks to Bob for driving a great race, and help with my spotting, as the iRacing spotter didn’t work for me the whole race. Thanks to the rest of the GoT #99 team for the moral support and also helping with spotting. Also a big thanks to NEO for the again flawless organisation (luckily we didn’t have any DDOS problems), and the NEO race stewards who had a busy night and had to make some difficult decisions. Great job guys, I know how hard it can be…