Preparing for a new season
The big season 4 update has just been released on iRacing and everyone is currently busy with trying out the many new features, cars and tracks that were included. For many in our team, maybe the most important update was the new Dallara P217, an LMP2 car that will be used in several official series as well as endurance leagues.
One of these endurance leagues is the IVRA Endurance league, which last year was called DGFX Endurance and where we placed 2nd place in both the LMP1 prototype class as well as the GTE class. The organization behind the league has now renamed the organization and the leagues and we are looking forward to the new season, starting with a 12 hour race at Spa-Francorchamps in October. Before that, we will try to qualify a third car to the league, while we have a GTE car and an LMP2 car already qualified.
Speaking about qualification, the last couple of weeks several leagues have had their pre-qualifying days, where many teams fight about the chance to race in the league in the upcoming season. We tried out to qualify a GTE car for the Sports Car Open league, competing against some of the quickest GTE teams on the service. Unfortunately, we only managed a 20th place in a field of 40 cars, where only the quickest 11 teams were invited to the league. The result is not so bad considering who we competed against, but it is still a disappointment not to qualify.
Some brighter news is that only one week later, it was time for pre-qualifying again. This time, to the 24H SERIES ESPORTS (formerly known as NEO endurance) where we put a GT4 Cayman to the test. The biggest competition in this league is arguably in the GT3 class, but the GT4 class has some serious competitors in the very high iRating range. After some late evenings getting to know the in and outs of the Donington GP track, we managed a fifth quickest time on pre-qualifying day, qualifying us to compete in the full season. We are very excited about showing what we can do in this league!
Besides these big endurance leagues, team members are also participating in other competitions, such as the Apex Racing Leagues for TCR, GT4 and GTE respectively. Some really good results also there, against some top drivers. More on that in a later update!