Blake
Premium
- 10,976
- NSW, Australia
- haswell00
Friday Feb 11, 2004
A week ago I was pleased when my major sponsor, Castrol, told me that they had arranged for me to test a LMP at Infineon Speedway. As you can probably imagine I was ecstatic yesterday, when a representative from Castrol told me they were willing to up my sponsorship and pay for a seat in this years Formula GT championship of course, I agreed.
Formula GT
Formula GT is a one make series with high performance open-wheel racers. These cars use a specially designed V10 which produces around 900 BHP, and they have phenomenal handling.
The series uses a super-sticky control tyre which aids passing and increases involvement from the pit crews.
The biggest quick in this series is that each car must be driven by two drivers, and each driver must complete at least 30% of the total race distance.
Tokyo R246
Friday March 11, 2004
I arrived at the track early this morning only to find out that the team were having major problems transporting the car to the track and they werent likely to get the car here until Saturday night. So I would go into my first Formula GT race having never driven the car, starting from the back of the grid, how fun this would be...
Saturday March 12, 2004
As soon as the team got here I told them how I need my car to be set up, that is with a lot of understeer. Ill just have to hope the car is to my liking.
Sunday March 13, 2004
As I was on my warm up lap the car I could feel the back of the car was pretty nervous, I didnt know what it would be like at speed, so I pulled into the P6 grid position and focussed on the red lights, my start wasnt as good as I wanted and I fell a few car lengths back. However my exit out of Turn 1 was great and I moved up to 3rd by Turn 2, would have been 2nd but we bumped wheels and I didnt have the confidence in the car to try anything stupid. I weave past him down the short straight to the long right sweeper, then around that I passed P1. I had had no practice at this track and I didnt know how to take the chicane, so I lifted for it and during the 2nd change of direction I really felt that oversteer I had worried about and I spun, falling back to 5th, lucky I had escaped damage.
Trying to show the team and my sponsors that I was worth every cent I pulled some crazy moves in the thin back section of the track moving up to 2nd, then getting some slip-stream and powering past P1 on the straight to finish lap one 0:00:090 ahead of P2.
I kept having trouble at the chicane and I was losing a lot of time taking it easy, but I still had a gap on the field. My tyres were getting pretty bad by lap 9 and I pitted, luckily I didnt seem to have excessive tyre wear as the rest of the field also pitted on this lap.
The next stint was fairly straight forward and I was simply maintaining my lead and making sure the cars oversteer didnt get the better of me. I pitted on lap 18, the 30% race distance lap, and swapped seats with my team-mate Eddie I could no longer put up with the damn oversteer.
Eddie did the next 9 laps at a medium pace and seemed to have a lot of from tyre wear, but other than that he seemed to have no issues, so he was instructed to increase his pace. Unfortunately he was too rough on his fronts and he was pitted a lap earlier than scheduled, we needed him to get 9 laps out of the next set of tyres so he was pretty laid back in the next stint.
He pitted with 16 laps left so the team told him to let it rip in the next two stints, which he did with no trouble.
On lap 56 Eddie lapped the field, except P2, when they pitted. Eddie caught P2 during that lap and lapped him the turn 1 on lap 57.
He then cruised to a victory where we lapped the field.
Championship
- Formula GT 2004 10 10
- Formula GT 2004 6 6
- Formula GT 2004 6 6
- Formula GT 2004 4 4
- Formula GT 2004 3 3
- Formula GT 2004 2 2
- Formula GT 2004 1 1
Blake
