Paul Ricard ELMS (France)
31 August 2016
Inter Europol Competition finally scored a good result at the European Le Mans Series! Weekend started in a very bad fashion. Our drivers constantly complained about poor drivability of the car. We worked hard to fix this problem in every practice session but the troubles only got worse. In the qualifying Jakub Śmiechowski was only 17th in the LMP3 class. On top of that he was beaten by 5 LMGTE cars which are very hard to overtake due to their higher top speeds. We decided to rebuilt the car overnight. The start of the race went very bad. Kuba got stuck at the first corner and at the end of the first to lap he was second to last. He began to slowly gain positions. After the first hour we were already on the 7th place. Kuba was one of the fastest drivers in the field. With the end of the second hour Jens Petersen took over. He was also very fast. 30 minutes before the end of the race we were on the 6th position. Sadly, the tires started to lose their performance rather quickly and Jens was unable to keep his strong pace and we lost one position to cross the line as the seventh LMP3 crew. Nevertheless we are very happy of this result. Despite huge problems at the beginning of the weekend we managed to overcome them and show our true potential by finishing on a great position. We hope to get an even better result at the next ELMS round. Meanwhile we will be travelling to Mugello in Italy for the next VdeV round.