Weekoverzicht 12h Sebring

Monday March 10th.

Although it was a rush against time for everyone at Riley Technologies and LG Motorsports to get the Corvette GT2 ready in time for Sebring, the result was pretty amazing.
At 11 pm on Sunday, the engine was started for the very first time in Florida. The engine ran well and so did the car the following day, on track.
Not one single problem during the initial shake-down on Monday’s morning session!
It did not take longer than the second outing of the team’s first test day, to already see a big improvement in lap times either.

“We really had a great day, today”, Marc Goossens said after the test. “After a lot of long hours and very little sleep in recent weeks for all the guys at Riley Technologies, we had the prove again that this company and their staff know how to build race cars. Not one little detail was overlooked and the car ran very well on its first outing. Of course we couldn’t compare lap times yet with the opposition but as soon as the second session we already improved our best lap time with no less than 3 seconds. There is obviously still a lot of work to do but everybody involved is extremely motivated and I’m sure we will be a lot stronger towards the end of the week. Hopefully my teammates and I can give the team a nice reward, by scoring a strong result, for the effort each one of them put into this project!

Wednesday March 12th.

The Riley built Corvette GT2 went through a great shake-down, an even greater first real test but had a little bit of a set back during Wednesday’s test day. Marc Goossens explains: As mentioned before, we went through a very positive roll-out and our very first real test, yesterday, was even better. I could not believe how competitive we were out of the box. Riley Technologies delivered a car that at the end of day one was only 1.4 seconds off of the fastest GT2 car. Although the car was still having a fairly big amount of understeer, we were much closer than I expected. But we have to be realistic and understand that we still have a long way to go. Therefore we made some bigger changes to the car overnight and on day two we couldn’t match our pace from day one. Of course we are at a race meeting and not just at a test. So because of limited track time we decided to make big changes rather than work methodically change by change. The multiple changes resulted in an improvement in some areas on the track, but at the same time we lost significant grip elsewhere. Therefore we ended up being two seconds slower today than yesterday. It’s not bad though as we now know that we can go back to our previous settings with smaller adjustments.
Still, I’m glad to see that the car hasn’t had any mechanical issues so far and we hope to continue making further improvements with regards to reliability, comfort and speed with this new car.

Tomorrow we have another session to work on our set-up before I qualify the car in the afternoon. At night I will do the mandatory minimum laps required during night practice before Lou and Doug will drive the majority of that session

Thursday March 13th.

Another day went by at Sebring with one free practice and qualifying in the afternoon, and a night practice. After having had a set back yesterday the LG Motorsports team decided to look at qualifying as a test session, rather than going for a one lap qualifier.

Marc Goossens explains: “We still have many things to try on the car, so we decided to use the 25 minute qualifying session as an extra test session. In free practice this morning, I tried some different compound tyres as well as a different construction tyre. Another type of tyres was used in qualifying. We sure did find our speed back from two days ago and we actually improved our lap time by another three tenths of a second during free practise. During qualifying we couldn’t repeat that time though. Again another set-up for the #28 Corvette, but the track temperature also got much hotter and we needed a back-to-back test at night to verify how much of our time loss during qualifying came from tyres, how much was the different setting and how much was down to temperatures. At the end of the day all drivers had to do the mandatory three laps in night practice. I started the session by doing our a-b-a test and we have learned a lot from that. High temperatures are not going to be favorable for us. So we will have to drive the car at our own pace, try to have a trouble free race and hopefully that will move us up the scoring table during the night stints on Saturday.
We skip tomorrow’s practice in order to prepare the car to the maximum for the 12H long race.”

Friday March 14th.

Today, Friday was a quiet day for the LG Motorsports drivers but not for the crew. The car did not go on track in practice as the team replaced the engine of the Corvette GT2.

“We decided to put in a fresh engine for the 12H race. At the same time, the mechanics had a chance to go over and check every single bolt of that department for the first time this week” says Marc Goossens. “And I can confirm that after a couple days of running, everything on this Riley built car was still as tight and connected as they put it together prior to our first outing!” Marc continues.

Tomorrow the day starts with the final warm up at 07:30 am and the green flag for the 12H race will be waved at 10:05 am.

The Goose will start the #28 LG Motorsports Corvette before handing the car over to Doug Peterson. Lou Gigliotti will then take over from Doug. The plan is to keep this driver rotation throughout the race.

Saturday March 15th, Raceday.

Unfortunately the LG Motorsport team could not continue the good form, which they had all week long, during the race.

Marc Goossens started the race and the team decided to concentrate on running at their own pace during the 12h race. So did Marc in his first stint. The first problem came after more or less an hour, when the team faced a slight problem with losing the power steering. The mechanics did a great job and repaired the Corvette pretty fast. At the same time Doug Peterson took over from The Goose.

Also Doug was running good lap times until he noticed that the car started overheating. He slowed down his pace slightly till he gave the wheel to Lou Gigliotti.
Lou was suffering from the same problems during his first stint. Everybody agreed that the drivers had to short-shift gears in order to try and bring the temperatures down.

When Marc left the pitlane for his second outing, he did exactly the same. He explains: “The entire team agreed on bringing the pace down some more and short-shift gears to bring temperatures down, but it wasn’t for long that we could do that. I started loosing too much power from the engine and at the end I even almost couldn’t get to sixth gear anymore down the back straight. So we decided to end the race at that point, as there was no point continuing and blowing the motor completely.

At least we showed the potential and the speed of this Riley built Corvette GT2, it’s just a shame we couldn’t get the car to the end. We all know how hard this race and track are on the cars and we had prove of that this weekend. Not only us but also other cars, that were even having a shot at the overall victory, had their problems. I personally would have liked to see our car finish, especially because I saw from close by how many hours and effort everyone at Riley Technologies and LG Motorsport put in this program. It would have been a great reward for these guys. I also want to wish all the best to Lou and Doug for the remainder of the season. They sure have a car that can run up front and I strongly believe it will not take long before this car can win races!”

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