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During the week
ending February 10th, drivers, teams and
transporters hauled themselves from all over the
world to congregate at the annual Daytona 12
Hours for GTP cars, hosted by OATAS. This year,
18 teams would take the start of this gueling
test of endurance over 2 classes, and it proved
to be one of the most exciting to date, and a
perfect way to kick off the 2008 endurance
season.
The Renown 4 Racing team set up early in the
week having made the short journey from the
team's American HQ in St. Cloud, Florida, just 3
hours South of Daytona by road. The team planned
to enter one Lights class Mazda 787b (#105 Momo
R4R) for team owner Scott Michaels and
Pennsylvania's Brendan Kaczmarek, but a late
deal with Brazilian Pedro Toledo made a two car
effort possible, so the #104 Mazdaspeed R4R car
was quickly transported North to join the team
mid week. Joining Pedro in the #104 would be
Ohio resident Joe Mudrak and 13 year old Brit
Sam Michaels.
The JPS France team were
another group to ship their cars over early. The
French team, consisting of team owner Antoine de
Mautor, Davy Decorps, Guillaume Siebert, Lucas
Marino, Martin Audran, Phillipe Martinelli and
Maxime Mironneu, who made up the 3 car team.
These three cars would be split between two GTP
Saubers (#68 and #69) and one Lights Mazda
(#168).
Vader Trophy Racing (VTR)
are the favorite team going into any GTP race.
Having gone through a perfect season in 2006,
these guys are simply a well oiled machine when
it comes to these endurance races. Four cars
have been entered for the season but only two
made the long haul from England to Florida, the
#85 VTR2 GTP Jaguar, and the #187 Lights Mazda.
Signed up for the #85 were Denmark's Jan Larsen
and Norway's Esben Tipple, while the #187 lost
lead driver and team owner Richard Dickson due
to having a molar removed shortly before the
race, leaving Neil Stratton to field the car on
his own. Despite this setback, the #187 is
expected to fight the two R4R cars for the
Lights win.
The main team expected
to fight VTR2 for the overall and GTP win is the
host team OATAS, who brought two cars to the
event, the #11 and #91 GTP Saubers. With quality
drivers like team owner Brian Wegner and
super-alien Damian Gosztyla, these guys are a
force to be reckoned with.
Other GTP entries
included brand new team WorldRacing.info, who
entered two Saubers (#48 and #49), 36TeamRus who
also entered two Saubers (#36 and #37), and
combination Team AtlasF1/Ringrace who entered
one Sauber (#01) and two Jaguars (#2 and #10).
In the Lights class there was also ISRA's #005
entry and Alaster's #000 making up the 18 car
field.
Heavy early week
practice was conducted in public by JPS France,
Renown 4 Racing, VTR and ISRA. The JPS guys
showed that the GTP pace would be well under the
90 second mark, setting times of in the 1:29.5
region around the 3.6 mile road course. R4R and
VT set the Lights pace, with both teams
completing hotlaps well below the 1:31
benchmark, while ISRA's mazda was in the 1:32s.
Other teams were being cagey, but there where
rumours of 1:28s in GTP private practice.
Saturday the 9th dawned
and the atmosphere could be cut with a knife,
with cars screaming around the track all morning
as teams shaved hundreths off laptimes and
pitstops, although most minds preyed on the
challenge of completing 12 hours and staying at
- or getting to - the top of the tree.
By 11:40am EST, the
climax arrived, and qualifying was to begin.
Damian Gosztyla proved
OATAS had the speed that had been feared,
setting a blistering mid 1:28 in qualifying. JPS
threw in the first suprise by outqualifying VTR2
with both their cars, and Jan Larsen lined up
5th behind the #68 and #69, as well as Brian
Wegner's #91 (the second OATAS Sauber). These
four cars were all very close in qualifying,
setting laps in the mid 1:29 range.
On pole in Lights and
6th overall was Scott Michaels in the #105 on a
1:30.7. The 4th row was occupied by the first
36TeamRus Sauber (1:30.and the Mazdaspeed R4R
787b (1:31.7). Rounding out the top 10 were the
#187 VTR4 Mazda and the first of the Team
AtlasF1/Ringrace cars.
Then there was the 10
minute warmup session, and after final checks
and pitstop practices it was time to go. Nobody
was truely ready, but nobody wanted to wait, the
start couldn't come soon enough....
As the green flag
dropped the crowd roared as Jan Larsen in the
Jaguar immediatley dived around the outside of
Antoine de Mautor's JPS France #69 Sauber in
turn one to take over 4th position. Jan
described his thoughts, "Someone said 'wtf are
you doing?!' in the back of my head, but someone
else said 'shut up and go for it!', so I did.
Worked a charm!" This move would set the tone
for the first hour, as positions 2nd through 5th
battled door to door to sort out the early
leaderboard, while watching Damian Gosztyla
drive off into the sunset. "If someone ever has
the strange idea to write a history of
Simracing, he ought to take good notice of the
first hour of this race, and especially the
battle for second between four cars, all in one
second for more than 20 laps, swapping position
almost every lap." as De Mautor described it.
Lights class leader Scott Michaels started out
with a consistent pace and easily held on to
6th. Further back, the 7th place starting
36TeamRus had a nervous early spin which caused
Pedro Toledo in the #104 Mazdaspeed car to spin
off in avoidance, losing them 2nd in class to
Neil Stratton's VTR4. This battle would rage
similar to the GTP class, with these two cars
trying to gain the higher ground on each other,
while they could do nothing about the #105,
Scott Michaels having a clean first stint to
drive off into the lead. "The start probably
couldn't have gone more perfectly" Scott
recalls, "I got to watch Jan pull a pretty crazy
move around the outside at T1, then saw the guys
in-front pull away, and the guys behind fall
back. After 10 laps I was in the middle of a 30
second gap and all on my own! I had a perfect 3
hour stint, no spins, no contact, and by the end
I was averaging low 1:30s with a fastest lap of
1:30.1, which I was pretty happy with."
By the three hour mark
the order at the front of GTP was:
1. #11 OATAS
2. #85 VTR2
3. #68 JPS France
4. #91 OATAS
5. #69 JPS France
With the #11 a few laps
ahead of the other 4 who were all on the same
lap, but way ahead of the rest of the GTP
Lights runners.
While in the Lights
class:
1. #105 Momo R4R
2. #104 Mazdaspeed R4R
3. #187 VTR4
4. #005 ISRA
5. #168 JPS France
.....Momo R4R already 3
laps ahead of Mazdaspeed R4R, 4 laps ahead of
VTR4, with ISRA, JPS France and Alaster dropping
further and further away from the lead.
Conditions wouldn't stay
so serene for the R4R boys though. After 3
hours, with only a few laps to go in his stint,
Pedro Toledo lost 2nd and 3rd gears in the
Mazdaspeed car. When Sam Michaels took over the
car was a horrible drive and the team quickly
lost 2nd place and dropped back from VTR4. Then,
shortly after Michaels switched to Kaczmarek,
the #105 car lost 2nd gear, and then was thrown
into the barriers when JPS France 69 spun right in-front, and the car needed to be towed back to
the pits for repairs. "Brendan was very fast in
the infield, but I'd managed to overtake him on
the oval, and then he was very close to me, and
under pressure I made a mistake, began to spin
exiting the horseshoe, and as we were too close he
hit me" De Mautor explains, "what I'm sure about
is that if he had kept a slightly longest
distance within him and me, he would have avoid
my spinning car." In all this the #105 lost the
lead, and damage meant it was 2 to 3 seconds off
the pace, so catching the VTR car was slow and
difficult work.
Meanwhile in GTP, Jan
Larsen in VTR2 managed to close up enough on the
#11 to hand the car to Esben Tipple less than
half a minute from the lead. But towards the end
of his stint, Esben made a big mistake coming
out of the chicane to end the lap and destroyed
the Jaguar's right front suspension. The #91 and
#68 had already retired, and the #69 had run
into a few issues, so Esben had enough of a
buffer behind him to hold on to 2nd, but the win was
slipping further and further out of reach as the
mechanics toiled to change the suspension. All
in all about 4 laps were lost.
As if VTR weren't having
a bad enough time, shortly after the half way
mark was passed the VTR4 car (still driven by
Neil Stratton) ran into engine problems and was
stuck out at the turn 5 horseshoe. The exhausted
Stratton managed to get the car towed back to
the pits, but there was nothing the mechanics
could do, the engine was done, the car was out.
This misfortune had
shortly followed a similar problem for the ISRA
and Alastar cars, leaving only 3 cars in the
Lights class, the two R4R cars way out ahead of
the #168 JPS France car which was slowly dying.
So by the 7 hour mark the Lights class was all
but decided.
However, the GTP class hadn't quite settled down, and there was one
more twist in the tail. At around 9 hours, the
race leading #11 OATAS car suffered a major
technical fault, causing it to spear off the
track at high speed in the kink on the infield.
The race marshals immediately deemed the car too
unsafe to drive and the car was instantly
retired from a 4 lap lead. The OATAS crew were
devastated but there was nothing that could be
done, and the win was handed to VTR2 on a silver
platter, as long as they could get to the
finish.
The running order at the
10 hour mark read:
1. #85 VTR2
2. #69 JPS France
3. #105 Momo R4R
4. #01 AtlasF1/Ringrace
5. #10 AtlasF1/Ringrace
6. #104 Mazdaspeed R4R
7. #49 WorldRacing.info
8. #168 JPS France
In the final 3 hours
little changed, apart from a complete disaster
for the two AtlasF1/Ringrace cars which saw them
drop from the podium, leaving the 3rd spot open
for the unlikely WorldRacing.info crew. The JPS
France #168 also ended up retiring, but with
nobody left in class to pass them, they were
still classified in 3rd and got to stand on the
bottom step of the podium.
The Momo R4R crew had an
interesting final few hours too, as Brendan
Kaczmarek showed up 2 hours late for his final
stint, which resulted in a 5 hour stint for
Scott! "I was all too happy to jump out and head
off to bed!" Scott said in the morning.
So possibly the toughest
Daytona 12 Hours rolls to a close, and all
that's left to do is congratulate the victors
and the finishers. For them and the rest, its
time to move on to preparation for the next
round, the 6 Hours of Mexico City, to take place
on the 3rd of March. |
