What a race! And talk about exceeding expectations. During all the testing we felt like we were quite off both when it came to outright speed and consistency. Even though
@Jonatan Åcerclinth had made a setup for us that was quite easy to be consistent with, we seemingly were unable to manage that. But come raceday, with all the lapping and traffic, we didn't lose out too much on that, and somehow we were much closer to the pack on pace as well, which was nice.
@Roy Magnes kept the car safe for his first stint, before I did the second. With some issues when it came to lapping, especially a P2 being less than nice, knocking out two GT's in the process, but overall gained some spots and had good speed. Gave the car back to Roy after a double stint, went to eat dinner with my roomie, watch some TV and relax. When I came back, somehow Roy had dragged the Unicef RMI Motorsport Ferrari up to 5th in class, and not only that, he also got it up to fourth when I was acting as spotter.
Closing in on the last stint for Roy, he went in to the wall and lost the front bumper and splitter, no big issue normally, just do a couple of laps with a lower pace, waiting for Jonatan to join, before pitting and swapping drivers.
However, when Jonatan got in to the car, the bumper and splitter were still missing, and the option to "repair damage" in the bit, was gone. So, with well over 5 hours left of the race, we had to do without front downforce.
Jonatan did his stint, and we swapped drivers to see if that worked, so
@Michael Nelson took over the car. Still without the front, so we knew that we lost between 2 and 3 second each lap, and we also knew that our front tyres got much more punishment from that, so now we were into damage limitation mode, figuring out that we would do between 8 or 9 laps less during the last hours than what we would've managed with a proper car.
So Michael did his stint, swapping with Jonatan again, that did his last stint, before giving the car back to Michael. And for some reason, suddenly we could fix the car, so for the last 50 minutes of the race, we had a fixed car.
But Michael struggled with getting used to a car that actually had front grip, and never got in to the pace he had in testing, and we fell down to 7th in class.
Still a result way higher than we had dared to joke about, but we can't help but feel that a top 5 could've been possible. Which for us would be around the same as seeing Minardi taking points in their last 10 years in F1. But we ended up like Luca Badoer in 99, so close, but still so far away!
Looking forward to Silverstone, and as I am not sure if I'll drive or not, who knows maybe I'll do the stream, or commentary, or maybe I will act as the team boss for the RMI Motorsport team, after all, I was a wannabe teamboss today, with Roy either driving or commentating!
The purple Ferrari will most likely be swapped for another livery though, what colors, who knows!
And as always, brilliant render by
@Jack Hintz
![Luca [OT]](https://overtake-data.community.forum/avatars/s/3235/3235113.jpg?1697196734){kind=avatar}
