Mar 21 2010
Retirement for Marc in Sebring due to cooling problems
Unfortunately the race in Sebring didn’s last long for Marc and his teammates. A cooling problem on the Jaguar made the team retire after 45 minutes in the race.
The meaning of the JaguarRSR team was to look at Sebring as a test weekend, since they started with a completely new car with almost no milage at all. On the contrary to the other teams, the JaguarRSR team approached the qualifying session as a practice session. They left all of their endurance equipment on, all of their endurance brakes, while many of the other teams went to sprint configurations aerodynamically and distance wise. The team chose not to do that because they really needed to learn more about the race. Marc was the one who drove during qualifying session. He went out at the start of the session and came back in again in the end. He drove 10 laps with a fastest time of 2:04.804 in his fith lap. “Qualifying wasn’t really a qualifying run for us“, Marc says. “We used it more of a practice session and finding out what the tires would do on the longer stint, so I went out in the beginning of the session and stayed out until the end to really get a good run in. The car felt reasonable, we got a good read on the Yokohama tires and on the balance of the #75 JaguarRSR XKR GT. I think we know which way to go for the race now.” Marc added on Friday.
Unfortunately the race didn’t last very long. Afeter the first few laps Paul Gentilozzi saw the water temperature start to rise. He brought the #75 JaguarRSR XKR GT into the pits at that point and the team did what they were able to do in the pit lane. They tried some things that they knew were possible causes of that issue. Afterwards Paul went back out and ran for a couple more laps. At that point the problem was still there so the team decided to bring the car back to the truck so that they could have the entire team work on it, because in pitlane you can only have four people working on the car. Once the JaguarRSR crew was able to fully assess the problem, they determined that they were unable to fix it in a satisfactory manner at the race track in the time allotted. Rather than risk damage to the car, they decided to end the race.
Instead the team started the preparation for the race in Long Beach wich is run during the weekend of April 16th-17th.
Below you can find some pictures of the Sebring race weekend.
