So, yesterday saw the come back of Scuderia Forza on LFS' brand new endurance league, the GTAL. Ringers Timo Hynninen and I(Yann Laprevotte) worn Forza's new cherry livrery painted by Alan Zadro.
The qualyfing session didn't went very well, as Timo, exhausted after an hard week of work, couldn't go faster than 1'36"6, which was quite good as it was only 2 seconds slower than the official MoE GT2 record, but gave us a quite disappointing 23th position on the grid. There was absolutely nothing to do against the FZRs on qualyfing conditions. Timo even said that "we [were] the last of the reasonabily fast people", and I think that can sum-up well the session.
Anyway, we started the race with a strong ambition : the top 10. We knew that could be possible, as we were fighting for it on Round 1 until we DNFed. I took the car for the start, and went on the top 20 easily before the race was stopped because the master server was down(click
here for the full story). 15 minutes later, the race restarted, and I managed to have a strong 1st stint, avoiding the major incidents of the opening laps. After 8 minutes I was already 16th, and I was 14th when I gave the car to Timo, after 1 hour of race.
Timo Hynninen pushing hard at the beginning of his stint.
Timo began his stint well, but unfortunately, a few minutes later, he accidentally down-shifted through a corner. The engine, already slightly damaged after I similar mistake I did at the end of my stint, didn't really liked that, and until then we lost approximately 10kph at the apex point and 1.5 seconds every lap. Anyway, Timo didn't give up after that, and continued to push hard. He made a little mistake on the chicane which cost us 8 seconds, but nothing really bad. After 1 hour of racing, Timo finished his stint on 15th position, and gave me the car.
It was really hard for me to set decent times with our damaged engine, but I managed to not lose too much positions, I even climbed on 14th position after some of our rivals made a few mistakes. I started the last laps with a field of 4 cars a few hundreds meters behind me, and resisted quite well. But, unfortunately, I didn't manage to preserve my tyres as I had to push really hard during the stint, and on the last corner of the penultimate lap of the race, the right front tyre blew-up, suffering from a puncture. I kept the car going, and decided to not change the tyres. I had to let pass SCP's XRR, but tried to block SRS. Finally Passo passed me on the inside of the very last corner of the race. I think we finished only 2 tenth of a second behind them, which is not bad for a 3 hour race !
Michael Passingham passing us on the last meters of the race.
So, we finished 16th, but after the DQ of car number 14, we got the 15th place.
Very strong race for us, of course we could have done a little bit better without the damage of our engine and the puncture, but this is endurance racing, and this kind of problems is part of the sport. Our plans aren't fixed for the future, but we'd like to be on the grid of Round 3 and hopefully more, even if we don't know what our line-up will be.
Anyway, I'd like to congrats all of the finishers, this was a very nice race, and I'd really like to have more !