This Saturday evening, 15th May Ministry of Speed lined up for the 4 Hour race of Aston North in the IGTC. Due to many drivers being available for such events as the 24Hour race, we struggled for a full roster, however new boys Klaidas and Timo stepped up to the task.
Klaidas was the more comfortable of the two on the qualifying setup, and set a fantastic opening lap which had him provisional second. Klaidas finished the session in seventh overall which we were highly content with.
Timo started the race and after pushing early on he found himself third place. Approaching his pitstop, Timo got a puncture coming through the final bend and pitted that lap. Disaster struck when issues with the server connection forced Timo to Time out, and nobody was able to join the server. By the time the server was fixed, Timo had lost six laps, and on the restart from the red flag we were starting at the rear. Timo pushed his way into the top ten without difficulty and Klaidas then took the driving seat. With less than one hour to go in the race, we found ourselves currently just outside the top ten by LFS' reading, though the mood was quickly changed when we were informed that we were to keep our six laps down gap after the red flag. We are extremely disappointed with the way this was dealt with, as it wasn't our fault the server acted up and lost us six full laps.
We hope for some better results in the upcoming races, and hopefully the tides will turn in terms of luck.
Drivers thoughts after the race:
K.Gasiunas: "I didn't knew 'bout all these things with server problems and lost laps before I came back. To be honest, I thought thats just tracker fail and kept driving. Just in beggining of my stint, I had my pedals disconnected from wheel, so I needed to recalibrate everything. After this it was just lap-by-lap procession for me."
T.Hofer: "The race started very well for us. Because of the crash in the pace car lap between Concept and CoRe I was able to hold P3 for about 20 minutes until spdoRacing's Silhanek overtook me. After that I had some other battles and ended up on P7 before my first pitstop at the one hour mark. But when I exited the pits I suddenly timed out and wasnt able to join the server again for the next 10 minutes until the restart. That pretty much destroyed our race because we lost 6 laps to the leaders. All in all it wasn't a good debut for me in the IGTC, I hope for a better race on Westhill in one month."
Next IGTC race takes place at 3rd July in fast and twisty Westhill International Circuit.