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Daytona 24 Hours 2000 |
Unfortunately this was not going to be a repeat of last year's race - not by any stretch of the imagination..... I arrived on the Wednesday and settled down to hear the team's sagas at the local Outback hostelry. All my driving colleagues were unknown to me and all had different levels of experience of the Daytona track but I was told that they were a good bunch of guys - good enough for me! Having arrived at the track we went straight to Victory Lane for a Driver's Briefing. (Standing there brought some very happy memories back..) Following this we sorted out a roster to try and give everyone a chance to become acquainted with the track. I had the most Porsche experience so volunteered to step down and attacked the local golf course with Rob Nearn and Nigel Smith!! We came back in time for Night Practice and I rumbled out on to the banking in the dark. It is not a difficult track to learn - just extremely quick and with others waiting to drive, you have no luxury time to build up speed. I did a few laps and came in - everything seemed to be where I remembered it.
These were still my feelings s Vic Rice took the car out for the first hour. He ran consistent times and handed the car over to Zak Brown for the second stint. Zak likewise did a good job and reported no malfunctions with the car. It was my turn next and I surprised myself by going straight into the 1.56's. The car at the start of the stint felt good and I settled down for the hour's drive. As I approached the end of my fuel window the EMKA GT3 had a blow out and we had a full course yellow. I dived in the pits to refuel and reboot and hit the end of the train again. On green I went for places and managed to take 8 cars on the first lap. These tyres were not as good however and I increasingly struggled to put the power down effectively. I was pleased when Rob called me in....... The car was not however destined to run much further - the engine let go shortly into the next hour and it was definitely terminal. Not a repeat of last year but fun (up to a point) all the same. We would never have caught the Vipers or Corvettes. We were some 30kph slower than them round the banking !! A great performance by them though - I'm still glad that we won one of the few things that they haven't over the last few years !!
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The
following day we qualified the car (even though we had an automatic
entry from last year's win), and she was ready for another engine
change. This was supposedly a new engine going in so even though we were
some way behind the leading times I was confident that over the course
of the race that we could be competitive.
