iRacing Endurance Series Race 1 - Suzuka
Time for a new series! iRacing has introduced a new endurance series, spanning over half a year with four races at some of the biggest circuits on iRacing. Each race consists of 12 hours of multiclass battle where an entirely new combination of cars are being put together on the track at the same time. While the GTE and the GT3 class often find themselves together on the same track, they have never in an official event had the company of the Audi TCR car and the Porsche Cayman GT4 car at the same time. This combination turned out to be a lot of fun, but together with the already quite challenging Suzuka track the hefty amount of traffic became a surprisingly hard task.
We had two GTE cars starting this race, both Porsche 911 RSR which is a great choice for the many sweeping curves of Suzuka. Although we had quite a bit of training on both the car and the track, it’s always a different scenario when it comes to race day and all the cars that let you through nice and easy on the practice sessions suddenly have something to race for and won’t let any class pass quite as easily.
With one car starting on pole and getting a few seconds up after the first laps, we had a good feeling from the start. But things were about to change…
This turned out to be probably the worst overall race for Hellracers so far, with too many spins to talk about and collisions with other cars and mistakes from almost all drivers over the 12 hours. That one of our cars managed to secure a third position is quite remarkable, and can probably at least partially be explained by the fact that our competitors struggled with this combination as well.
With bruised egos and bruised cars (both cars had the iRacing-typical bent carbon fibre wing) we still managed to bring the cars to the finish line and that felt like an achievement by itself. We intend to continue in this series over all four races, but next time (Silverstone in June) we hope to be able to not only bring the cars to the finish line but also do it in style.