HERO in the GT3 Championship

23 June 2010

Last weekend saw the FIA GT3 European Championship back in action in Spain at the Jarama Circuit, just outside Madrid.

Jarama is an old fashioned Formula 1 track, it was built at the end of the 60s and used as an F1 circuit during the 70s only to be abandoned as F1 started becoming more safety conscious and asking for circuits to upgrade things like escape roads and barriers, which the circuit didn't have the reources to do. In fact, tarmac apart, the circuit today still feels very much like it was never touched from the 70s, with a very bumpy surface and very little in the way of run off areas making it one of the most challenging circuits in the whole of Europe.

The good news was that being in Spain in the middle of June no rain was expected for the whole weekend. The bad news after free practice was that we found out the Ferrari was clearly not the most suited car to the bumpy track, having only set the 15th fastest time. Despite our best attempts to fix the set up of the car, qualifying only confirmed what we had seen in free practice, with my fastest time only good for 13th place and Diego's fastest time seeing him back in 19th position. The only consolation was that the time gap to the fastest guys was not so big, with my fastest time of 1.34.7 only 1.2 seconds away from pole position, so we knew that if we got a good start we would not have been too far awy from the lead guys.

And luckily that's exactly what happened in race one, where I took the start and immediately moved the car up from 13th to 9th before the second corner of the race! Another good overtaking move on the Audi of your rising star Matt Bell and I was into 8th position, and chasing down hard the next Audi driven by former GP2 driver Michael Ammermuller. I caught him him within 2 laps and splistreamed him down to the main straight, and after a bit of wheel banging at the first corner I was past him and onto the back of the Corvette of double Brno winner Joakim Lambotte. In the meantime 2 cars in front of us collided and had to retire soon afterwards, which meant I was up to 5th position already! I was the fastest car on the track at that point in time and within 2 laps I caught the Corvette of Lambotte, who made an unusual mistake by running wide at turn 3 and allowing me past, which meant I was in 4th position and catching the Porsche of Joe Osborne at a rate of more than half a second a lap. Joe pulled into the pits for his driver change on lap 18 which meant I was running third for the rest of my stint until I got called into the pits and handed the car over to Diego, who restarted in 3rd position, followed closely by the Audi of Kenneth Heyer and chasing down the 2 cars in front of him, which were having a fight of their own. The cars in front were the Lamborghini, which Albert von Thun und Taxis had qualified on pole position and that was now leading the race in the hands of Giorgio Sanna, and the Corvette of "the usual suspects" Kellwitz and Hohenadel who always seem to end up being in a podium position… The Corvette was clearly quicker than the Lamborghini, but Sanna defended well for a number of laps, the two cars however slowing each other down and allowing Diego and the Audi of Kenneth Heyer to gain over a second a lap on them. Eventually Sanna cracked under pressure and left a little gap at turn 4, which Hohenadel took advantage of and placed the Corvette on the inside, Sanna tried to close the door but it was far too late and the resulting contact ended up in the Lamborghini spinning. After a well recovered spin Sanna was relieved to still be in second place, but within a few corners he had the Ferrari of Diego right behind him, flashing lights on and looking to pass. At the same corner the following lap Sanna made the same mistake and Diego made the same move that had taken Hohenadel into the lead, the same contact was made by the 2 cars and Sanna spun again! Unfortunately the contact also slowed Diego down and allowed the Audi that had been following him closely to drive past both him and Sanna. It almost looked settled, Corvette 1st, Audi 2nd and Ferrari 3rd, until a few corners to the end of the race when the leading Corvette started slowing down - it was running out of fuel! It made it onto the last corner in the lead but the Audi of Kenneth Heyer made it past him to win the race, whilst Diego was only able to finish third less than a second back from the Corvette… It had been a breathless, mad race, which we could have won with a bit more luck - still starting from 13th we were happy to finally be on the podium!

The second race unfortunately is a much much shorter story, our Ferrari breaking the alternator belt during the warm up lap and resulting in all electronic systems slowly switching themselves off on Diego, who had to park the car after racing for less than 10 minutes. A very freak breakdown of a very very inexpensive piece of equipment, it seems like our bad luck this year is never over…

Still, we finally managed a podium and we are heading to Paul Ricard in the South of France in 10 days time, a circuit that should suit the Ferrari well… keep your fingers crossed and thank you for all the support emails/phone calls I have ben receiving in the last few days!

Ciao

Giacomo

28 May 2010

Brno was a new circuit for me, as not a lot of car racing championships go to the Czech Republic, but it is a popular venue for motorbike racing as both Moto GP and World Superbikes race there every year. It's a really nice smooth circuit with lots of fast corners, so it does take a bit of learning but it certainly looked like it suited our Ferrari as we managed the second fastest time in free practice on Friday.

Onto qualifying, and having had a poor qualifying at Silverstone everyone was keen to make amends - I went out to qualify for race 1 and despite discovering that our set up developed on Friday didn't suit the track following the overnight rain, with too much understeer in my 2 best laps with new tyres I managed a 7th place, much better than in Silverstone but still not quite as high as I was hoping to be. The team made a few adjustments to the set up before sending Diego out for the second qualifying session and things looked good - Diego doesn't use the radio very much but was immediately on the radio to our chief engineer to report that the car felt very good! With his first flying lap Diego set the only lap time by any car in the championship below 2 minutes of the weekend, no other car managed to get close to that so we gained Ferrari's first ever pole position in the FIA GT3 Championship! The local crowd was very excited and that meant we had to stop for a good 15 minutes to sign autographs after the press conference, still a price worth paying…

Onto the first race and once again the sky was looking very dark as I got in the car (see pictures attached). Still the track was dry and only a few drops of rain were falling so together with the team we decided to go out to the grid on slicks, little did I know that only after 4 corners the skies opened and the track immediately became extremely wet in certain parts, it was so slippery that one Audi went off during the formation lap… Back on the grid we decided like the majority of the grid to change onto wet tyres for the start of the race, but unlike most not to change the set up of the car as it had stopped raining and it looked like it might dry out relatively quickly, so I prepared to race with a suboptimal car hoping to then change onto slicks at the pit stop for driver changes and have Diego run really fast in the second part of the race. That and the fact that the Ferrari is the only car without a properly race developed traction control, I knew I was in for an interesting race…  After 2 laps behind the safety cars we were released, on lap 1 I quickly managed to go past the BMW starting on the front row that had decided to start on slicks and despite seeing the top 4 ease away I was happy with my pace and involved in a good race for 5th with the Lamborghini official test driver Giorgio Sanna and the Audi of Stephane Lemeret. After 2 laps like this both Stephane and I managed to go past Giorgio, but my time in 5th position was short lived as the Audi R8 of Stephane clearly has better traction than the Ferrari and he went past me into the tight Arena section of the circuit. Trying to stay with him as the rain started to come down again unfortunately forced me into a small mistake, the Ferrari spinning and whilst I managed to restart quickly I had lost 4 positions… I managed to regain one before the pitstops and handed over to Diego. The track had started to dry but clearly not enough for slick tyres, so Diego took over in 10th position but the car was still not right for the conditions and despite a number of fast laps only managed to improve to 9th before the end of the race.

After the disappointment of Saturday afternoon's race we were relieved to see the track completely dry on Sunday morning. Diego was starting from pole and the team was feeling confident. Diego had to make two good starts as at the first start the Porsche of French Carrera Cup Champion Kevin Estre ended up flying on top of the Ford GT of Christopher Nygaard, causing the deployment of a safety car. Stil, second restart out of the way and Diego was leading followed by the Corvette of 2009 French GT Champion Mike Parisy, the two cars driving away from the rest of the pack but never separated by more than half a second. After a series of very fast laps (we in fact recorded the fastest lap of the race) Diego and Mike both came into the pits at the same time for driver changes. Now, like in almost every other GT championship, the FIA GT European Championship prescribes a minimum set time for driver changes (for safety reasons to avoid drivers driving off still doing their seatbelts up, or worse without seatbelts on), so there is an art in stopping for just the right amount of time but not too long and we like every other team practice these things during Friday free practice. Unfortunately our race engineer misread his stop watch when releasing me from the pits, and released me a full 10 seconds too early! He almost immediately realised he had made a mistake and was immediately on the radio to get me to slow down before exiting the pit lane - despite my best efforts though which included crawling to almost a halt I got out of the pitlane about 6 seconds ahead of the Corvette - at that point I wasn't sure whether they had had a slow stop (unlikely) or we had still gone out too soon (much more likely) but decided to press on until anyone told me that we had done something wrong. For 3 laps I was in the lead, lapping consistently and at the same pace as the following Corvette, I almost started to think that we had got away with it, but then my engineer got on the radio and as I drove past the start finish line I clearly saw the penalty sign indicating we would receive a stop-go penalty for exiting the pits too early. I immediately came in and served my penalty, our pace had been very good and even after the stop-go penalty I came out in 6th position and started pushing and catching the cars in front. A podium was out of the question, but 4th place would have still been possible… but the stewards had a different idea… having penalised us once for the quick stop they then thought they should penalise us again for driving too slowly in the pit lane and trying to avoid the first penalty!!! After a few heated words over the radio (I was quite fired up and later found out I did my quickest lap of the race at that moment in time…) I was told to serve another penalty. This time I came out towards the back of the pack and with only a handful of laps left all I could manage was 15th place.

Once again a very depressing end to a weekend from which we could have got so much more! Unfortunately with the Corvettes scoring lots of points again and us scoring very few points we are now down to 10th of 30 cars in the championship, still with the pace we have shown we are going to be out next time looking for some justice…

…and with the next race in Jarama, just outside Madrid, in the middle of June, we are hopeful of no rain and a normal weekend to allow us to show our true potential… keep with us folks good results can't be too far away:)
See attached a few pictures of the weekend

Ciao
Giacomo

PS the races were live around Europe but in case you missed them you can see replays of them and read full race reports on the race series website www.gt3europe.com

5 May 2010

Just a quick update those of you who I haven't spoken to about our progress in Silverstone last weekend. As you know it was the first race weekend of the season, and as the sole Ferrari team in the FIA GT3 European Championship a lot of eyes were on us at the start of the weekend. There were 30 cars at the start, with Porsche fielding 6 cars and no less than 2 factory drivers, Corvette fielding 5 cars and Audi fielding 8 cars! Other cars taking part included Lamborghini Gallardos, Ford GTs, Aston Martins and BMWs, all in all a very competitive field.

Qualifying took place on a damp track on Saturday morning after an overnight shower, we had a small problem with the ABS sensors installed on our car that wouldn't have made much of a difference in the full dry but on a damp track meant Diego and I could only qualify 11th and 12th respectively for the 2 races. The Ferrari has a very good engine though and we did record the fastest speed of any car competing so we still had hopes of making some progress in the races.

Both races are 1 hours races with rolling start and a compulsory pitstop for a driver change between the 25th and 35th minute of the race. I got to take the start of the first race and had a good start overtaking 2 cars in the opening lap, made another position on lap 4 by overtaking the BMW of Csaba Walter and then got down to doing some fast laps to catch the cars in front of me which had built up a few seconds gap. By lap 8 I was behind the fight for 6th,7th and 8th place and manage to overtake a couple more cars to head into the pits in P7. A good inlap and pitstop meant that when Diego reemerged from the pits he was in P5, and with Diego charging it started to look like me may even have a chance of a podium! Diego overtook 2007 FIA GT3 Champion Gilles Vannelet in a Porsche quite easily and with a few laps left was catching quite quickly the Lamborghini in front of him, driven by former BMW factory driver Ellen Lohr. Ellen was struggling with very worn tyres but she clearly hasn't forgotten how to defend a position, so despite some repeated attempts at overtaking that resulted in the cars touching twice we unfortunately had to settle for 4th place. Still not bad starting from 12th!

Sunday morning and Silverstone was again wet when we got there. The race however wasn't until 12.15 and with the clouds lifting and some wind coming up the track was drying. We like most teams elected to start on slicks although the track was not fully dry at the start. Diego took the start this time and after an incident at the first corner took out the Corvette that had qualified on pole he was 10th at the end of lap 1. Once again we were quicker than the cars in front, and a series of aggressive moves resulted in Diego passing a number of cars in front of him, including winner of race 1 Tim Bergmeister. As the half hour mark approached, Diego was running 6th and catching the cars in front of him. When the engineer on the pit wall tried to get in touch with him over the radio to let him know it was time to pit he got no response and soon understood there was a problem with the car radio so the team had to revert to the old fashioned pit board. Diego eventually saw the pit board and came in and when I came out of the pits I was in 2nd place right in front of the Aston Martin that would eventually take second place! Unfortunately after only a few corners we suffered another problem, this time with the sequential gearbox remaining stuck in 5th gear and eventually forcing us to retire. A very demoralising end to the weekend, particularly when we discovered that the car leading the race was handed a drivethrough penalty, which could have resulted in us winning the race had everything gone to plan!

Still, at least we come away with the knowledge that we were competitive, and if we can run without any problems we should be regularly fighting for podiums. We are now looking forward to the next race in Brno in 3 less than 3 weeks time…

Ciao
Giacomo