It didn’t look that good for us on Saturday morning. Already on Friday we found out that we do have a problem with our rain tires when its under 15 degrees celsius. The car is just snapping on the rear end, caused by the tires loosing the grip suddenly and leaves us with massive oversteer in fast corners.

So we were prepared to work on it in the qualifying session. But than when Romain Dumas was on his first timed lap, at Wehrseifen he was just rolling out with a problem. At the end we found out that there was something wrong with a shaft between the differential and Gearbox.

So no time for us and starting from the rear in the first group.

To make it short, our tire problem was still there and we lost more than 2 minutes in the first half of the race.

When I jumped in the car, we tried a different set of tires and also modified the car. This was supposed to give us a better balance.

At the beginning of my stint, I was able to hold the pace while I was fighting with a Porsche Cup car. Later I found out that it was Christopher Mies. He did a great job and was probably happy to play with me and the green and yellow Porsche  😉 . But there I could see again how dramatic our problem was. He could take a speed into the fast curves, I was dreaming about!

But my time was coming, because with slightly drying condition the rain tires and our modifications started to work great and I was able to catch up to the front by nearly 10-15 sec a lap. That put me into P2.

Near the end, I had to come in for a splash and dash and a new set of rain tires. After that we actually lost our position to Audi that by than was driving 10 seconds faster than me.

Still we managed to end up P3 coming from the back of the field!

I think we learned a lot this rainy weekend and we know, that we have to work closer with Michelin to give us the tires we need. Temperatures at the end of May in the night won’t be much higher and to win the 24h again we need to solve that problem.

Overall I believe that with the “Balance of Performance” the GT3 cars are in a slightly better situation than us for the moment…..apparently.

More work and preparation has to be done….! 😉

Marcel