The FFR PDG GTM team had a great weekend running in the Western Endurance Racing Championship. We fast qualified, and ran from pole to checker in P1 for our class and 2nd overall in the 3 hour night race.
But that's just a small piece of the story. Our competitors, Truspeed Motorsports built a new car for this year because they knew we would be faster and had to do something to compete in our little "arms race". They beat us in the first race, last month, only due to a bearing failure for us during the first part of the race. That said, they are quite a bit faster than last year and they were within 4-7 seconds of us for about 45 minutes of the race. Then we managed to build about a 1 lap lead before pit stops. They put their faster driver in and changed all four tires along with refueling. When they came back out they were better than 2 laps down. Then we had our pit stop. 25 gallons of fuel is all we did, so now the Porsche had new tires and a fresh, fast driver. This proved to be a serious endurance test for Carl Rydquist, the driver of the FFR PDG GTM, as the cool suit failed to work for the entire race. It was 90+ degrees ambient air temperature. Well over 110 in the car.
In any event, he did lose some time to the refreshed Porsche in the last hour of the race, but when the checker fell we still ended up over a lap ahead of the Porsche.
A great event for us, and now we look ahead to the high banks and serious speeds of Fontana, which will be our next event on May 20th for the 2nd round of the United States Touring Car Championship.
Video to follow...