Control Is an Illusion: Twelve Hours at Mount Panorama

While the preparations for the season are in its active phase, I would like to look at our cars, and think. Is it a beautiful car? How will it look on track? Have we done the right thing with it? I had studied art for 8 years, and when I have no means to find out how fast we are before the first race, I would think about how my favourite object on earth, the car, looks. That’s what I was thinking before our first IRO event. I wasn’t sure if I liked that car. I wasn’t sure at all.

Then comes the race weekend. The closer it gets, the more information I gather about ourrselves, about others, about where we roughly stand. My focus shifts to results. Me, being a former racing driver, it has both positives and negatives given my new role of team principal. I have control and I don’t at the same time. I can control the preparations, negotiations, discipline, coaching, testing, strategy… But as the lights go off, I suddenly feel helpless. My drivers are on track and I have zero control over the situation. And it puts my brain in an awkward position. I suddenly become a boss with zero control. I just have to trust my boys to do this now. And wait. And 12 hours in a wall-jammed Bathurst is one long, bloody wait.

I’m not an expert in endurance racing. We did our first endurance race last December, the Britcar 24 Hours of Silverstone, and that’s it. That was my second endurance race as a team manager. Different platform, different circuit, different drivers, but frankly the exact same car. I’m a BMW fan whose team drives the AMG. Yes, I’m not an expert in endurance racing. But I learn my lessons. Endurance is only about one and only one thing - consistency. What you need to make sure your team operates at full consistency is a different question and a slightly tougher one. And when my drivers go out on track, this question becomes rhetorical.

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We messed up the qualifying and had to start seventh. I personally was not too worried - you can start whenever you like, it’s 12 hours ahead within the cruel, unforgiving walls of Mount Panorama, one circuit I love and hate at the same time. All I wanted was that precious consistency, but you never know. Lag, connection issues, tiredness, anything can lead to that one mistake that would turn our race upside down. One little thing can chew the whole team and spit it out. The only thing the whole team had to do throughout these 12 hours was to avoid that. And boy, they did it brilliantly.

Our Greek superstar, Panagiotis Grammenos, Lightning McZeus, was starting the race, a tough one since he went into the unknown. Within the first 2 laps he went from 7th to 4th and then managed to get third by the end of the stint. Followed by the turn of his Cypriot companion, Alexandros Savvides, Halloumi-nati Speedster, who only joined our team just before qualifying. He held well to P3 but lost a bit of ground due to the others being on a more aggressive tyre strategy. We were saving. We knew our time would come towards the end of the race. Payton May, the only one who had previous experience in IRO prior to the race, took over. Uncle Slam slammed the gas and started climbing back to P5, but more importantly, closing the gap to the leader from 56 seconds to just 34. Half race in, 6 hours done, 6 to go. The top 5 are pretty much running within half a minute. That stayed the same during the next stint, where PG managed to pull a few incredible overtakes again, and made all of us watching lose a couple of nerve cells.

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And then were the final 2 stints, exactly those that we were waiting for. We saved the better tyres, and we could finally push. Payton May, aka Captain Ameri-Car, not only cut the gap to the leader, but turned a 32-second deficit into an astonishing 48-second lead, all within 2 hours. The sun began to set... Everybody was getting tired… And that was the time to unleash our weapon, to put one big dot on this saga. The fresh and fast, the Autobahn Assassin, Herr Horsepower, the Hessenator, Jason Käsmann came into play. The tyre shredder, but hey, we knew that. He doesn’t like making tyres last long, and the whole strategy prior to that was aimed at giving him the tyres he likes for the final stint. And he did it. All I had to say was to keep it steady. Drive slower. No risk. The concept of “driving slower” conflicted with his brain. The kid just didn’t care. He was setting fastest laps while chatting to his viewers on Twitch.

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Yes, we won. I felt relieved. And at that moment, I realised - our car is the most beautiful car on the whole virtual planet of GT7. And my drivers… they are the best drivers on the real planet. Are there faster drivers out there? Of course. Would I switch my guys for them? Not a chance. Nobody is perfect. Not me, not the livery, not my drivers. But I love every single one of them because we are a TEAM. We move forward together, we learn together. We fail together and we succeed together. This time, it was a success.

I woke up the next day and the first thing I thought about was when do we start testing for round 2 in Interlagos. It’s 6 weeks away, should I even tell my drivers to start practicing? Probably not yet. Let them grasp the moment. We start practicing tomorrow.

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Photos by PG