25 November 2006
WOSEC Le Mans 24 Hours

It seems there's no rest for the insane! After our glorious result at the Bullrun 1000, the R4R team had to skip the champagne celebrations (neither me or Sam drink anyway!), and turn our minds immediatley to Le Mans. While we sent our equipment over to north Italy for the Monza pre season Race2Play V8 Supercar event that was scheduled for a months time, the drivers caught the next flight to France, to meet up with our third driver Brendan Kaczmarek and begin another week of hard practice.
As expected, the Mazda 787b was miles off the pace. Brendan had barely managed to get within 7 seconds of the top of the time sheets (VTR1 where ripping up the competition with 3:26 lap times and 220mph top speeds, while the Mazdaspeed R4R 787b was barely topping 195mph on the straights, and looking at measly 1:33s at best), and it was looking like the event would be nothing better than a long test of perseverance, to see if we could pick up any pieces the Sauber and Jaguar drivers left for us in the final hours, assuming we could even make it that far...

Qualifying went well enough... I was once again scheduled for the first stint and therefore got the job of qualifying. I managed a 3:34.3 on a perhaps overly conservative lap. This was good enough for 16th of 34 (in the top half of the field), which was encouraging, if slightly depressing when compared to last weeks performance.
The race started off as you would expect a 24 hour race to. Most teams played it safe and held position. Chilean Racing (started 15th) decided not to do this, and managed to spin infront of me in the 4th corner (the fast chicane before Tertre Rouge) and I had nowhere to go... luckily no harm was done but it was certainly a scary moment early in the race.
I am very proud of my first stint, it went on for 3 hours and - other than one unscheduled disconnect - went perfectly. The car was perfectly intact and I had kept up some good laptimes. Due to the disco we wheren't in a particularly strong position, but we were moving up, so all was looking good.
Then Brendan took over. He had looked very strong through practice, but perhaps the pressure got to him when he took the wheel for the race. He lost a gear early in his stint, and rolled the car in the Porsche curves, along with a few other incidents. By the time Sam took over the car at about 6 hours in, it was in a bit of a mess! Oh well, we had to keep going and try to make it to the end...
But at 12 and a half hours, now with only 2 gears remaining, it all came to a sudden end. Brendan shifted up coming out of Tertre Rouge and the engine finally gave up. And that was that.
We finished 16th in the end (right where we started!), having completed 192 laps, 195 less than the winners.

Oh well, maybe next year! At least it was a somewhat fitting way to say goodbye to WOSEC.

Congrats to VTR1 on yet another win, rounding off a perfect season.

Now, back to looking for a new engine and gearbox for Fasturd...

Scott