First race in 24H SERIES Esports powered by VCO
Time for a new league! We have been wanting to participate in this league for quite some time, and we were really happy to secure our spot for the 20202021 season. As always with a new league, it’s hard to know what to expect and how you will stand pace-wise compared to the competition but we knew that there was going to be some tough competition.
The league is yet another multi-class endurance league, which is something we appreciate. It gives the team something to strive for together and the multi-class aspect usually brings some extra elements into the racing. The four classes are GT3, Porsche 911 GT3 Cup, GT4 and TCR. We race this season in a GT4 car, the choice falling on the Porsche Cayman GT4 which we feel slightly more comfortable with than the BMW M4 GT4.
Besides an experienced organizer in Niel Hekkens, the 24H SERIES eSports also have a collaboration with VCO which gives an extra spice to this league with some great coverage of the races. We can very well recommend tuning into the iRacing Esports Network on Youtube during the next race and watch the broadcast.
On to the race! We qualified in P7 which felt pretty much in line with our pace. Starting on the front row in this league requires pretty much world-class pace with some of the participants being in the top of GT4 drivers in all of iRacing. We are not quite there yet and settled with starting in fourth row.
As we have repeated several times, and keep on repeating, endurance racing is as much about keeping the car in one piece as it is about pace. This race turned out showing that to a great extent. Car after car were involved in incidents, got punished by race control or had other problems and about halfway into the race we found ourselves in P4 while we on track really only had done one overtake. The gap behind us grew more and more comfortable as well.
With about one hour left, we were within 15 seconds of P3 and gaining on them. A podium was within reach! Philip in the car pushed as much as he could, while still keeping a big enough distance to the GT3s zooming past our car. When the gap to P3 came down to 6 seconds, we ran into some heavy traffic and unfortunately, the podium slipped out of our hands in the closing stages of the race.
Quite quickly, we brushed off the sense of failure though, P4 in our first race in the 24H SERIES is for us a success. It’s a highly competitive league and we saw it as a triumph even to qualify. It happened to be one of the most fun races we’ve had in iRacing with some close and respectful fighting, skilled competition and an organization surrounding the event that put the silver lining to top it off. We look forward to the next race!