LE MANS - After a strong outing in Barcelona where we didn't get what we deserved, we were determined to strike back during the Road to Le Mans weekend.
Our weekend schedule was quite unusual due to the Michelin Le Mans cup being a support race for the 24 hours of Le Mans. Our weekend started off on Wednesday with 2 practice sessions. I got in the car during the first part of the session and immediately felt comfortable on the track. The pace felt good right from the get-go. With a long weekend ahead, we didn't take too many risks and played it safe. We ended up in P18, but we knew there was still a lot of time to gain. Our second practice session of the day didn't go as planned as Pieder was involved in an accident. The damage to the car was not too heavy, but we didn't get the chance to collect any data or complete any laps.
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The team did a great job repairing the car for the 2 qualifying sessions on Thursday. However, the car felt really unstable after a setup change we made earlier. Combined with some traffic at the wrong time and red flags during our improvements, we didn't achieve a representative lap time, resulting in a disappointing 51st place. We knew we could easily find a great amount of time, as we already did in FP1. Unfortunately, a spin due to the heavy instability of the car resulted in our car getting beached in the gravel trap and put us out of the 2nd qualifying session before we could set a time. 57th place was the verdict. Not what we wanted or expected.
Still, our Thursday wasn't finished just yet. Throughout the afternoon, we analyzed the data from the few laps we had completed that day and decided to go back to our original setup from FP1. With the setup changes completed and knowing that we still had great pace in the car, we went into the first race on Thursday evening with confidence that we could make up a good number of places. And we did. Despite being held back on occasions due to the superior straight-line speed of the GT3 cars, we made up a bunch of places, going from P51 to P29 in class. It still wasn't the result we had hoped for before the weekend started, but we made the most of this race and were able to showcase our pace and overtaking abilities.
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On Friday, we had one more race to go and were confident that we would make up a lot of places as well, and again, we did. Pieder had a good start and gained some positions. After an incident, the safety car came out, and I got in the car. I started feeling more confident as the race progressed and proved it with my overtaking and lap times. During the last part of the stint, I was comfortably sitting in the top 10 of lap times being set at that moment, even while dealing with traffic from the GT3 cars. Despite the good pace, I was too far back to get into the points-paying positions. Going from P57 to P23 in class just shows how much more we could have achieved this race if we had started at the front.
This wasn't how any of us expected the weekend to go, but that's also a part of motorsport. We take away the positives from a weekend in which we had some incredibly bad luck. We have the pace to fight for points, and that's what we're going to do at our next race at the Le Castellet round at the amazing Paul Ricard circuit (14-16/06).
A big thanks again to the Haegeli by T2 Racing crew, who did an amazing job repairing our car as quickly as they did last weekend. I also want to thank all of you for your continuous support during the last couple of weeks.
