ZOLDER - My first back to back race weekend of the season. Our second race of the Supercar challenge brought us back to Belgium to Zolder. We were in a positive flow that started building since our successes at the Hockenheimring. A good flow that we were determined to continue throughout the weekend.
The weekend started like always, getting back used to the car and the circuit before setting competitive laptimes. Ian and I quickly got up to speed and started to push the car a bit more. This was before a red flag which ended the session early.
During FP2 all of us had some running to catch up to after losing around 20 minutes in FP1. This meant a busy track but great practice to put in some race simulations with traffic. Without pushing the car to the edge, we managed to secure a promising P2 here.
Pushing the car to the edge, would be something that we were going to do in qualifying that afternoon. And that’s exactly what we did. In the 20 minutes that we had to complete qualifying our lap times quickly dropped while I set my personal best lap ever, but it was still not enough to beat the turbo Norma. P2 it was but a very promising one.
A hot Saturday afternoon was the perfect scenery for a nail-biting race up until the last lap. Ian started the race and kept our rivals in check throughout the first stint. Our rivals pitted first and had an amazing pitstop, until we and the race directors discovered that they breached the pitstop regulations. A few laps later they were handed a drive through penalty. We pitted a few laps later than them and kept hoping for a Safety car of Full course yellow to help our overcut. Our pitstop had to be 10 seconds longer than theirs, a success ballast because of our victory at Hockenheim. Ian got out of the car and I went in to try and secure our 3rd win of the season. We got out of the pits an 18 seconds gap behind them, a big gap of course but with their drive through penalty they had to serve we knew we were going to overtake them. But our luck changed sides, right at the moment they had to pit a car went off and a full course yellow came out and they lost almost no time with their drive through. Only 15 laps remaining and a 15 second gap, an extraordinary stint was needed to bring us within a shot of victory. The full course yellow ended, and it would be qualifying laps until the end. I started to close them down rapidly and it would be even faster if it wasn’t for the traffic I had to deal with. Starting our final lap being 2s behind I knew it would be extremely close and it was exactly that. Into the overtaking points of the track I was just to far behind him and finished 0.2 of a second behind. P2 while it could have been more. I was gutted of course, being so close yet so far. The disappointment was quickly converted into an extra motivation for the race on Sunday.
On Sunday we were out for revenge, the Zolder Superprix wasn’t going to end for us without a win. That was the mindset we had at the start of the race. The race that I started, on the start I immediately got past the polesitter in an aggressive move around the outside. A blistering opening lap separated us from the rest of the field, and it didn’t end there. I set fastest lap after fastest lap until I got into traffic, then it became a lot harder to drive my qualifying laps. Still, I was gaining every lap on the rest of the field. While still occasionally setting a fastest lap or close to it every time I got into clean air. This kept going on until our pitstop window opened. Our rivals pulled the trigger early and boxed immediately, I was in no rush as our advantage was big enough to come out ahead comfortably. As I stayed out the engine started to cut out occasionally, I boxed right after it. While I got out of the car and Ian got in, they checked if they could visually see if there was anything wrong with it. They didn’t see anything, so Ian drove out of the pitlane. Immediately he felt there was something wrong and had to retire the car before making it to the end of the lap. An almost certain victory cancelled out by a mechanical failure. Such a shame but the issue has already been determined and will be fixed at our next race weekend at Spa. It will be a perfect opportunity to wash away the disappointment of this weekend.
