GTAL 2010 news from 5th and 6th rounds (3 Hours of Fern Bay Gold and 6 Hours of Aston Historic Reversed)
3 Hours of Fern Bay Gold (Round 5)
Because of lack of time, to prepare for the qualification, we started in 19th position. But just after 3 laps the red flag was risen. It was the worst news for us, as our one driver had to leave after 1 hour after race start. It took quite a while race to restart. After 19 laps, we were in 13th position but unfortunately we had to do mandatory driver change, as we mentioned before, our driver had to leave. After driver change we drove 13 laps more but we decided not to continue the race as in any case we would still break the 75% rule, so there was no point to race. Everything would have came out well if not that red flag. After this misfortune we dropped from 3rd to 6th place in standings.
6 Hours of Aston Historic Reversed (Round 6)
We started in 10th position and beginning of the race was wonderful, because in 4th lap we already were in 2nd place. Unfortunately it wasn‘t for long, as in 7th lap we made mistake in „corkscrew“ and spun, which led to broken suspension and 18th place. But our problems didn‘t end with this accident, as later we made the same mistake in the same corner and dropped to 26th position and we had to pit because of damage. Later on we drove consistently and we tried to save tyres in order not to do additional pit stop. After 2 hours racing, we were in 15th position. After a while we had to pit for the 3rd time and before the pit we were already in 13th position. In 3rd pit stop we did driver change and the next driver came back into 18th position. In the middle of the race, because of flipped car, safety car drove away from the pits, which was very good news for us, as we got a chance to catch up everyone else. In 4th race hour we made some mistakes and lost some positions and just before 2nd driver change, we were in 6th position. We had many opponents behind us, which were very fast and were waiting for someone‘s mistake. 1 hour to race end, 7Karat car, driven by N.Gebauer, started to push and after some time they overtook us, but not for long. As M.Runas did the best he could and retook the lost position. Left just 10 minutes to race end we noticed that Something Awful Racing car, driven by E.Smith, was much slower than us and the gap between was just seconds, so we started to go beyond our limits and after some fighting we got 1 more position. Unfortunately, in the main straight, when we were fighting with E.Smith, we made contact, because of which we got 2 seconds penalty. So in final results we were 5th but we got championship points for 4th position, as there was guest team car in front of us.
In last round we will try do our best, to get as much points as possible, because gaps between championship points are real small. We wish best of luck to all teams!