![]() ![]() The race leader, Thiago, was overtaking our battle, preparing to lap Nabil and me, and it came down to traffic management. I struggled with lack of rear grip into and out of corners. ![]() I had marginal fuel with cold, worn tires that had 5 more laps of wear on them than Nabil's tires. Starting Lap 79 I emerged from my fuel-only final pit stop 4 seconds ahead of Nabil. I took on 4 laps of fuel, no tires, standing still in my pit box an agonizing 18 seconds. Furiously calculating to the nearest liter while maintaining race pace with overtaking traffic was no mean feat. I was getting better fuel mileage than planned, but I had to squeeze every last half-second out of my last pit stop to avoid getting passed in the pits and losing 6th place to Nabil. Another incident on Lap 61 opened that gap to 48 seconds, where it hovered up to Lap 76 when traffic management lapping a difficult John and yielding to Olav and Michael reduced that gap to 44 seconds. Nabil's extended stop on Lap 55 for fuel and damage repair cost him about 25 seconds, and he recovered about 35 seconds behind me. We were out of sequence on pit stops, with Nabil squeezing one or two more laps out of each tank of fuel in his Acura. I kept an alert eye on the 8-second gap back to him, and Nabil held the interval steady from Lap 30 through Lap 51. The race unfolded with Nabil as my nearest threat. Last week's 30 minute Qualifying race was a primer for the in depth calculations required for Saturday's 150 minute endurance race plan, and we validated our planning methodology to the exact lap with an error of 1.31 liters per 592.1 liters total fuel burn. Challenging in that most of the race was driven at night, and rewarding in that I bonded with my race engineer by learning to trust his race planning, detailed fuel calculations, and pit strategy. The 2 1/2 hour endurance race was challenging and rewarding. My tighter line exiting Ten took me over bumps that broke traction in the rear, causing throttle-on oversteer into a spin. The third error happened on Lap 48 immediately following an overtake of lapped traffic exiting Turn 10. The second error happened when I locked the rear wheels braking too hard for the pit entrance. The first driver error was unforced on Lap 5, occurring when I turned in short at the Hairpin Turn 7 and upset the car over the apex curb into a spin. ![]() That's a 3.6% error lap rate and 0.00274 lost lap time rate. ![]() All in all we had three driver error laps out of 83 laps completed, at a loss of 25 seconds lap time. Starting 8th on a grid of 21 racers, our objectives for Sebring in the #007 Lola DBR1-2 were to run a clean, damage-free race using a well thought out but flexible race strategy and score solid points with a top-5 finish. Sebring Circuit 2 1/2 hour Endurance Race Saturday American Le Mans Series LMP1 Season 10 Opener ![]()
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January 2023
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