iRacing Endurance Series Race 2 - Silverstone
After a disastrous first race in this series, we went into the second race with lowered expectations. This time, 12 hours at Silverstone was the plan and once again we started in the GTE class with our Porsche 911 RSR. However, since summer means that other important things except sim racing occupy people’s minds we only had enough team members available to run one car.
Once again we ended up in third split, mostly due to the very small number of GTE cars in each split. Unfortunately, with four classes the iRacing match-making system decided to only put 6-8 GTE cars in each of the top splits (8 cars in our split) while the other three classes (GT3, GT4 and TCR) made up for the rest of the in total 55 cars. The GTE field in our split was quite strong but it is inevitable that over 12 hours a few cars retire which left us with few cars to compete against.
Anyway, on to the race. We didn’t find quite the pace in qualifying that we wanted but ended up with a lucky second place anyway, just a few hundreds of a second ahead of third. The start was uneventful and we could find the rhythm quite quickly. It became apparent some time into the first stint that there were three main competitors running away from the rest, and our car was one of them. It’s quite something when there is only a few seconds between contending cars even after hours of racing, and it felt like this could be a really exciting race. We switched places among the top three a few times but about one third into the race, the other two cars had a moment and collided, giving us the lead.
As it would turn out, we didn’t give away the lead after that, except for the pit stops when we were on slightly different strategies. Our car crossed the finish line only 15 seconds before second place, but with the rest of the GTE field being lapped by us one or more laps. Finally an endurance race victory after some less fortunate races!