American Le Mans series at Elkhart Lake

Now for a proper race report...

P:

Loaded up my ARX Spa setup and set out for some laps. Marcos, Ryan and I had some fun chasing eachother, and during this time I realised I was running not enough wing. I was losing huge amounts of time through the Carousel and also had to brake pretty early for T1. I altered my wings from 2/10 to 3/13 and shortened 5th and 6th gears. This worked out well. With some further tweaks of the diff, I got the car into a nice feeling for the race.

Q:

Unsure of what to expect, I set out for a banzai first lap and managed to hook all the sectors up pretty well for pole, albeit by only 1/20th of a second to Ryan!

R:

Got away well at the start and kept the boost at 3/4 for a the first 5 laps to effect a gap on Ryan. Once about five seconds up, I dropped the boost to 1 to stretch the fuel as much as possible.

All was going well until my in-lap. Coming downhill out of the carousel, I hit the pit-in request button... or at least, thought I had! The neutral button is adjacent to my pit-in button. Before stopping to think twice, I flicked the up-change gear paddle and was doing 150 mph in 1st gear. D'oh!!!!!

What was promising to be a solid race-long battle with Ryan turned into a smoking, steaming pile of broken engine.

"Shucks" is quite appropriate here. Next time!! Very fun up until then.

Engine blew from nowhere, normal temperatures (100C) and engine lifetime above 85%, very sad. Having a great race with big advantage to second place.

With this result my title hopes go completely away.

Sorry to Frans Visser for the unexpected overtake at the end of the opposite straight, hope i didn't cause you too much damage.

Grats to the winners, expecting better luck for Laguna Seca.

Sorry to hear that T, was looking to be a fun event!

Congrats to Joao and McConkey on such a tight finish!!

Race report after I get outside for some fresh air.

Congrats to everyone! That was a belter. Gawd.

Qualifying was pretty tight, and Joao pipped me for pole on his final lap. I coulda maybe made a run at it, but I misjudged braking at one turn, so I threw away any advantage I might have had on my final lap.

Race was pretty steady! I had the idea that I'd run Mediums for an hour, get new shoes for another hour, and then put Softs on for final 45 min and run balls out on Boost 3.

That strategy quickly fell apart, as the tires seem to last longer than I was thinking! So I decided to not change on first stop and keep going with the Meds. I came in with less than 1 lap of fuel, and I find Joao in my pitstall!! I had to wait maybe 10+ sec until he was through, so I could get serviced. That was basically the deciding factor with the race win, imo.

Anyhow, I came back out with +26 sec gap to Joao, and I just put the hammer down. Trying extremely hard, and not caring what I'd do to the tires, even though I needed them to last at least until 55 min left.

The pace was remarkable! I was wearing the tires down to nothing, and had a few moments, especially with Nikola. I apologize to him. We kept getting caught up at bad sections of track. Even with all this, I was getting some nice laptimes in.

Like I said though, the pace was there until I had 25% left on the tires. Crazy stuff.

Finally with about 50 min left I came in for new shoes and full tank so I could run Boost 3 and try to catch Joao. I pit before him, cuz I was worried we'd pit at same time yet again and I'd have to wait.

It all worked out though, and the gap was about 6 seconds after our final stops. I got up to him with about 20 min left, so I had time to work with and try to get around, but he was fast on the straights, and I was fast in high speed turns, and also I seemed to have better braking. I had a few pokes, but I couldn't pull off anything.

I had a HUGE moment going into the back straight with a P2. I think I had the car sideways, but I managed to hold on.

The final lap, I was kind of possessed, I don't know where that laptime came from. 2:01.915 on worn tires and some traffic. I had my BEST run on Joao coming out of the final turn on the final lap, and going up the hill I was bouncing off limiter in 4th gear alongside him, and when I switched into 5th gear, I seemed to lose some acceleration, and it was enough for him to stay ahead. 0.086 sec! Just!

:) Fun day racing with everyone. See you all at another great track next time!

Well this was my first time racing with you guys here and it was fun for a while until I messed up. I only made one lap and lost it in the carousel. I fihures just park it since there was a bad lighting storm here anyway.

But what was up with the start???? The GT1 leader was way back about 20 car lengths or so from the LMPC cars in front. By the time we came out of turn 14 the lmpc's were up the hill allready. Not sure but I thought the field should have been a little closer at start.

Oh well it was fun running with faster guys and learnign some things.

I can't thank my team mates Jose and Sergio enough for the setup as I was not really ready for the race today. I wasn't the quickest but made it to the end with only a few bobbles. I double stinted the tires at the end which put me in front of Paulo but then I noticed he had an extra stop or a real long one. This gave me the cushion I needed to hang on for the win. I was surprised to see so many out so early but thats racing and I've been there too!
Great racing with you all and congrats to all the podiums!

Hi, congrats Ryan, Joao , Nikolah, and especially to Paul Nadeau.

i had some mechanical failure, the crew was working hard to solve the problem and finally i finished 3rd

great racing

" I had a HUGE moment going into the back straight with a P2. I think I had the car sideways, but I managed to hold on. "

It is surely me Ryan, I'm sorry ...

I came to realize that I would be very fair in gasoline and head into the calculations, I was driving on autopilot without asking the question that you were fighting with Joao.

Any further apologies

Sorry for not showing up when I signed up for the race. Went for a nap and never woke up until 10pm,stupid me.

With 3 aliens in my class, 4th was the best I could hope for. Mainly because the're all pretty consistent. But then Tristan dropped out and a few laps later Marcos had to pit with damage halfway through the first stint. So I thought, well, keep it on track and second place is in the bag.

Marcos was over 1 minute behind and I thought I was save. Little did I know that he must have been pretty fired up after his misstake. He was catching with 1 sec. per lap and more. When he finally caught up with me by the end of the second stint, I thought I'd let him trough, because I believed he had to do 1 extra stop on the third stint as he was out of sinc with his pitstops. Wrong. He pitted 1 lap after me for the last time :). Jeez, how can he be 2 seconds faster then me and save so much fuel? That guy deserves a medal.

Oke, so I was doing a lot of testing for the 4 hour event of Spa the day before, and then practising for this race paid its toll. Halfway through the second stint, my arms were really heavy and felt like they were gonna fall of. I had no precision in my steering any more and laptimes were going up fast. At one time I lost 20 sec. over 2 laps in succesion with traffic and all. Meanwhile Matt Willoughby was closing the gap fast. I saw him come and when he was only 2 sec. behind me, I was like "oke, thats enough, pull yourself together". I forgot about my arms and concentrated on hitting my marks and my lines. I didn't preform any miracles, but could hold the gap at 2 sec. now.

Keymoment at this time was that I overtook a backmarker in the carousel and Matt was blocked. He lost a few seconds and after that ran into some trouble. All and all a hard fought 3 place. Was hard work but fun.

See you all next time :).