ineX Racing Takes 3rd in Eventful ALTERNATE 24h Race
The ALTERNATE 24 Hours of Aston GP, was held September 11-12th, 2010. ineX Racing would start the race from 5th position, with Dennis Lind running the first three stints. The lead should be shared by Dennis and Alternate for the first few hours. After Dennis's final pitstop, Rudy van Buren would get in the car ten seconds behind the leaders, Team Sirius. Rudy started to chase down the leaders, but unfortunately timed out on lap 73. This disconnection caused the ineX Racing FZR to lose around three minutes and obviously compromised the strategy. Afterwords Dennis reconnected and had two incidents with the same nGT. This eventually cost the team over a minute and would put them nearly 5 minutes behind the leaders.
At this point moral was down as the ineX drivers sat in 14th place with huge margin to the leaders. To make matters worse, Rudy had no idea how long it would take to gets his connection working again. Drivers Teemu Iivonen and Nils Herrmann were scheduled to drive the night time shifts, and thus were not available at that moment. Soon thereafter, Sasa Pasic from Team Sirius timed out and had talked to an admin who promised to give the lap back after the race. However, this could not be changed on the tracker during the race. We then contacted two admins and explained the situation. We were in hope that we would be treated in the same manner as promised to Sirius.
Dennis started pushing as luckily Nils managed to arrive in time to backup Rudy and the evening. Throughout the night the ineX Racing drivers successfully closed the gap and worked their way back to the front. Teemu and Nils perfectly executed the night stint schedule, and by Sunday morning we were sitting in the top five and Rudy has fixed his connection. To make up for lost time on the schedule, Rudy drove five-one hour stint, back to back to back, and pulled the ineX Racing FZR up to third position. The last hour was all about getting the gap below 2mins and 50s in hope our 1 lap penalty for the timeout would have been removed after the race.
When it was all said and done the 1 lap penalty was not removed and thus Alternate takes the win. There is no denying that the people in team were left with mixed feelings. As frustrated and disappointed as our drivers were after the final results were released, we are still satisfied with 3rd place considering the penalty lap was still in place and that the guys showed remarkable performance while coming back from 14th to finish 3rd.
Besides the racing in general, we got to know our newest LFS driver squad addition, Nils Herrmann. Also, most of the team had a good time together and enjoyed the race on and off the track. The race also served as a good practice for upcoming endurance league events.