IVRA Endurance - 12 hours at Spa-Francorchamps
First race for the season in the IVRA Endurance League is now completed. As always there’s a lot of nerves in the hours and minutes leading up to the race. That’s one part that makes sim racing so much fun, the team has prepared for this for weeks, everything is in place to make the race as successful as we can manage but it all boils down to keeping the focus and having the pace when it counts. The pressure of driving fast while managing traffic and avoiding race-ending mistakes makes most of the drivers in the team feel nervous before the race. That nervousness is probably a good thing though, it’s a sign that the race means something and that we all want to perform well in the race.
The day started “early” at 13:00 with warmup, followed as per usual by a driver’s meeting and qualification. The actual race started at 16:00 and went on for 12 hours, making this a long day for most of the drivers. Qualification has quite a special format in the IVRA leagues, where the car is not allowed back into the pits once it has left the pits. So even if the qualification is 15 minutes per class, this rule means that the qualification becomes quite special since the tires often become too hot after a couple of qualification laps. Especially around Spa, where the length of the track makes each lap heat the tires more.
After qualification, our LMP Pro cars ended up in 4th and 20th place on the starting grid, the second car having some issues during qualification. The GTE Pro car started in 8th after a not so successful qualification. Spa is also a track where a lot of teams run it often enough to have a very quick pace, and the fight for pole position is even harder than on other tracks. It will be interesting since the calendar for IVRA Endurance will take us to some tracks that are very rarely run in other leagues, meaning that the playing field might become a bit more open when the track has not been trained over and over in other leagues.
Unfortunately, this race became the IVRA race where the Race Control really got to know our car numbers. Where in the previous seasons, we have rarely been on the wrong side of incidents or caused any ruffled feathers, this time around we ended up with quite a few penalties. Some of them were very unnecessary, such as the pit infractions where, in the heat of the moment, we just didn’t remember to obey to the pit rules that the league set up in a quite clear way. Being the first race of the season, Race Control made sure that everyone was obeying all rules, and we were punished not once, not twice, but… even more times. This is something we will definitely change for the next race, we prefer that Race Control don’t know our car numbers at all.
IVRA Endurance is one of very few leagues that uses Safety Car when incidents happen on the track, and this brings a very different mindset in the races where everything when it comes to tactics can be turned upside down at any moment by the SC. It’s something that you need to accept when racing in the league - sometimes it brings the car that is running away from you back to right in front of you - sometimes it messes with your hard work keeping the tires alive longer than the competitors. It’s all about adjusting to the things happening on track and having done your homework so you have the information you need to make the right decisions in each moment. There is no need to have a complete race tactic by the start of the race, it’s taking the correct decisions along the race that will lead to good results.
Over 12 hours, a lot will happen, but having a decent pace and keeping the car in one piece will often lead to good results and so also this time. At the time of writing this, the only results available are unofficial results and some decisions are yet to be taken by Race Control for incidents happening late in the race. With that in mind, our GTE Pro car came out with the best result for the team, placing them in P3 in a highly competitive field. LMP #29 had a good chance on a top three finish but an unfortunate mistake in the last restart of the race dropped them down to P11, while LMP #19 had a rough race and topped it off with some unfortunate timings with the safety cars, leading to a P23 finish in the LMP class.
Saturday ended and became Sunday before the race was over, our cars crossed the finish line around 04:15 local time on Sunday morning. A bit too late, most of us thought, but the racing made up for not having much sleep during the weekend. IVRA continues to bring some very fun and exciting racing, this year with a really competitive field in all classes.
Edit 2020-10-13: Official results are now posted for the league, since not all decisions were taken by Race Control by the time this text was written, the official results look slightly different from what is written above. Our GT Pro car drops to 4th in class, while our LMP #29 finished P5 in class and LMP #19 ended up with a P11.