Race Report from Spa-Francorchamps

Friday Practice

It was my first ever visit to Spa and one that has been on my bucket list of tracks to race at since started racing. The first time I drove up through Eau Rouge flat out I had the biggest grin on my face and this was just the start of the weekend. The BOP (balance on performance) that we had been given for the weekend was not good and we knew we would have an uphill battle all weekend. They added 55KG extra ballast, raised the ride height 10mm and put us on a silver restrictor. 

That aside we did some great runs in our 2 x 1hour test sessions but struggled with setup in the long fast sweeping corners of Double Gauche, Stavlot and  Blanchimont where the car was understeering at approximately 140 -150 mph, causing us to loose over a second in just those corners. We all knew we had to work with what we had got despite the team make a official complaint to the organisers about the BOP. We did some long runs and the race pace was we achieved meant we could possibly finish P7 or P8 in the race.

Saturday free practice and qualifiying

Saturday Chris went out in the car for the 1st free practice and bedded in some new brake pads before we could try a couple of setup changes to the car. I then went out and the new setup helped a little bit in the high speed but gave us some over rotation in the low speed corners which was easy to manage than the front understeering in the high speed so we stuck with that set up for qualifying.

I did the 1st qualifying 10minutes and was really pushing hard and knew I was over driving in places but I had to throw everything I had at it and was only able to do 2 flying laps putting me P10 in my group. Chris then did his 10 minutes qualifying session and again had to be on the limits everywhere, he got in 2 flying laps also and managed to qualify P8 in his group but we all knew that’s roughly where we would be, so we ended up jointly qualifying P10 for the race and our sister car P9.

Sunday 2 hour Race

I was nominated to start the race and once the lights went out managed to get a good start and stay out of trouble making up 2 places on the first lap, I then started to settle in to the race but by lap 4 I was starting to have issues with the car, we had a DSC failure and the temps all started to go through the roof so I was having to manage all the temps with the help of the team giving me advise over the radio and having to almost do a cool down lap before being able to push again and still try and keep the other cars behind me. Unfortunately I had quite a boring race being on my own for most of my stint apart from the occasional attack from behind which I was able to manage but could not gain any ground on the guys in front of me, the team kept me out as long as possible before calling me into do the driver change with Chris. I came in in P2 but that was only because the other teams had done their driver changes earlier and once Chris was back out we went back to P8. Chris did all he could to try and battle his way forward but to no avail and also had to manage the same issues I had got in my stint. He was getting caught very quickly by the P9 driver and only just managed to hold on to P8 at the flag finishing just behind our sister car that finished P7.

We all as a team did the very best we could with what we had the weekend even tho the BOP was not the best I had still had an amazing weekend at an iconic track and I still have a big grin on my face  when I think of going up through Eau Rouge and into Raidillion.

We now  have a month off and go to Brands Hatch on the 10th/11th September on the full Grand Prix circuit, this will be full of non-stop action especially around the back section with it’s blind corners and fast sweeping bends.

With thanks to Jakob Ebrey, Stephen Fisher and Ricky at Sprite Photography for the imagery.