Red Bull Ring ELMS (Austria)
19 July 2016
For the third round of the European Le Mans Series we handed over our car into the hands of Jens Petersen and Jakub Śmiechowski. In the free practices they showed a very good performance. Unfortunately the qualifying didn’t go as planned. Kuba’s fastest lap was not acknowledged because he crossed the finish line just a few seconds after the session has been red flagged. After the restart in his potentially fastest lap there was a brief yellow flag just in front of him so he had to slow down. As a result we finished in the 13th place, but we were not concerned. We knew that our race pace is very good. The race started quite ok. After a few laps Kuba had found his rhythm and consequently climbed up the order. Just before the end of the first hour he came into the pits for refueling. He rejoined the track in 9th position and continued his quest to close the gap to the cars in front. But sadly his race ended prematurely… One of the lapped LMGTE cars didn’t see that he was being overtaken and crashed into our car. The impact was not very strong but just strong enough to successfully take us out of the competition. Yet again we leave the ELMS paddock with huge feeling of dissatisfaction. The pace would have been enough to finish at least under the top five. We hope to interrupt this bad streak in France, during the next ELMS race at Paul Ricard.