| After this
day's efforts we have found the right setup on the car to get a fast lap
and I managed to qualify the car in on 18th out of 220+ cars, which means
we will get that very prestigious flashing blue light to mount in our windscreen,
facing forward (the 20 fastest cars get these blue lights to signal to
slower cars that we are front runners). |
| Our day: So
we are finally underway with the driving. We also still have our one car
in one piece which really isn´t the situation for everyone - no less
than 30 cars were involved in some sort of incident during this first two
hour long practice! They either spun out, had mechanical failures or collided.
Just insane... Anyway, our run began with me going out to check the chassis
balance on the GP track and then check that the suspension, bump stops,
dampers, ride height and aerodynamics were correctly tuned for the Nordschleife
part. |
| Overall, the
balance was perfect on the GP track, which means it´s a little bit
to oversteered for the Nordschleife, you couldn´t really go flat
out on the fastest and most bumpy parts since the car was just a little
too looose. This got worse when the tyres started to wear out, so the team
is fixing some small things at this moment; we have some margins to work
on the rear ride-height and sway-bars are easily adjusted. |
| Speed in the
car was good otherwise, gearing is good, engine is really strong and the
brakes are awesome. On my 2nd lap when I had checked the car was decent
also on the Nordschleife I got a good start on my flying lap, passing among
other Uwe Alzens brutal Porsche Cayman RS on the GP circuit. Unfortunately
on this lap there were some cars that had suffered serious crashes on two
different places, causing yellow flags and marshals were out on the track
to tow the wrecks so we were like a queue of cars that had to go really
really slow for some hundred meters and it just ruined any chance of a
decent lap time. |
| When Ulf went
out it only took half a lap before two cars collided and went into the
barriers just in front of him, when they were all diving down Fuchsröhre
at 200 km/h - he just slammed the brakes and luckily went through without
a scratch..! Like expected he did a really solid job. Peter ran well as
usual, no drama and good pace but he also had comments about oversteer.
Martin was fast as usual, suffered traffic and yellows too and had even
more problems with oversteer when rear tyres were really getting too hot.
At the end he at least got a 9.46 putting us on 27th out of well over 220
cars. |
| The teams
with the best laptimes were the ones who could exit the pits first since
they got clean runs in the first couple of laps, before all the incidents
started occuring, so tonight we´ll try to do the same thing and get
our car out into the pitlane as early as possible. Also at a late stage
in tonight's session there might be less cars and incidents on the track
that may give an opportunity to get a clean run, the car is a lot faster
than it shows at this moment. |
| Peter is in the car at the moment,
practice just started. Weather has been cooling of a bit but hopefully
there won´t be rain tonight. We hope that our setup changes will
provide what we want from the car, to be able to keep full throttle a greater
percentage than this forenoon. |
| The team just had a nice barbeque
that team owner Anders cooked and some guests to the team are arriving
too, among others my former MV Racing team-mate Håkan Hall, that
was fun. We have done many races together from 2004-2006. Ok, getting back
to you all with a quick report tonight when the second practice session
has ended. |
| Second session: We had a thorough
discussion with our race engineer Fredrik after the morning session and
made some changes to the car, which resulted in appr another 15 seconds
on this 25km challenging track. We ended up as 18th (out of 220+ cars)
which is very prestigeous due to that flashing blue lamp we get to mount
inside our windscreen, facing forward to signal to slower cars that we
are front runners. Obviously also fans, photographers and TV notice this. |
| Race starts at 3 pm so I´ll
post some impressions during the day. For the top twenty there will be
an extra drivers meeting tomorrow at 10 am. |
