IVRA Endurance - Pacing at Phillip Island
Race two of this season’s IVRA Endurance took place at Phillip Island, a fun Australian track with a lot of fast, sweeping corners. We had done our practice and positioned our three cars on the starting grid with a good feeling. The qualification round went ok for all three cars, no pole positions but in the upper part of the field which is usually all that matters for endurance racing. As the race progressed, things started to look good. All three cars were in contention for a good finish, and apart from some small contacts with other cars on the narrow track, the cars were in good shape.
Things started to go south, though. The race included no less than seven safety cars due to incidents on the track, and in total the cars spent more than one of the four hours behind the pace car. That in itself makes it hard to predict what is going to happen and to make the right choices in the pit lane. However, we were quite successful tactics-wise and continued to fight for the podium spots.
However, the further the race went on, the more situations arose. Race control had a busy day, and when the race ended there were more incidents to look at still, than what a typical race has during the entire race. A lot of the drivers in the race took unnecessary risks leading to collisions and our GTE car collected so much damage from other cars’ mistakes that it lost all speed and couldn’t compete for a top position anymore. On top of that, race control found an incident and punished the car with a time penalty after the race moving it down the order to P8.
Our two LMP cars looked good up until the very end, with just 15 minutes to go they were both on the podium spots and could even fight for the win. However, things went south yet again. A collision with a GTE car and post-race penalties put our two cars down to P4 and P6, a decent result but a disappointment given how it looked in the final stages of the race.
In the end, this race was not about pace but keeping the car clean and - to be fair - having some luck with both pace cars and not being the victim of other people’s mistakes. We are not quite satisfied with having those kinds of things determining our race, but at the same time we also made mistakes and ended up in the race control room again.
In a month, we’re going to Barber for another race at a tight circuit and we are eager to show that we belong on the podium.