Sunday, January 24, 2016

Gran Turismo 6 GTPlanet Sportscar Series Round 1: London 12 Hour


The London 12 Hour is the first endurance race I've done in my virtual racing career. It was a new experience, a new challenge for me, a part of racing that I've never discovered. I was recruited by Phisher to join Turtle Racing League on 12 October 2015, and after some discussion, I accepted his offer and joined the team and got to meet the members. Turns out I knew half of the members from other franchises. As I'm 14 only this July, I was the youngest rookie going into the VW Fun Cup London 12 Hour race. The VW Fun Cup is a championship consisting 3 events, using heavily-tuned Volkswagen Beetles. Before the race, I had gone through lots of preparation learning about how the race was going to work. It was quite a lot to swallow. 53 drivers in 14 teams were registered for the 3rd annual London 12 Hour @ Brands Hatch Indy Circuit.

Team and Driver Entries

As the race organiser opened the track, we went out onto the track for a 40 minutes qualifying session. As the track improved, I managed to clock a 51.447,  which put me 5th in my group and 8th overall. I was pretty pleased with this result, as this gave us an average time of 51.576, which placed us 4th overall, and 1st in class. 

Qualifying Results

We had 14H before the race start. Regulation change: "Tyre compound for the race will be Racing Hards (RH), and not Racing Mediums (RM)" 

This surprised everyone. Everyone had been practicing and tuning the car with RMs, including us. We started tuning the moment I ended my Qualifying session, to get a good setup prepared for the race. 

Starting Grid

With 4 drivers in Turtle Racing League, we decided to split the time evenly, meaning a 3H stint for each driver. The race was scheduled to start at 7:00AM UTC, with Randy doing the first stint, and my stint was scheduled to be from 10:00AM to 1:00PM UTC. Turns out Playstation Network was doing maintenance to the servers, and there was a mass disconnection during the first stint, followed by a red flag. The race restart had been delayed by 40 minutes, so my stint time was reduced to just a little more than 2 hours. We had a formation lap, followed by a restart and I was off to start my 2 hours and 20 minutes of driving. Due to our 1st driver having network issues, I had to cover up the 2 lap gap between me and first place in my class. By 1 hour, this gap was down to 1 lap, and everything was going well as planned, with only 2 cars left to overtake: Spinning Arrows Racing and Snail Racing League. 

Hour 4 Classification

Between hour 4 and hour 5, Snail Racing League had a driver change. We got in front of them, and tried to catch Spinning Arrows Racing. At this point they had a 7 seconds gap, and we were closing in, very very slowly. Backmarkers appeared in front of us. As we went through the traffic, the gap was getting smaller and smaller, close enough for me to get an advantage boost from slipstream. His tyres gave way in turn 1. He managed to catch back the tail of the car, but with all that speed lost, I overtook him on the run to turn 2. We were now 1st in class, and 4th overall. Further in the stint, Escuderia GTMX, one of the teams in the higher class, experienced network issues and several disconnections. During that period of time, we managed to get past them, promoting us to 3rd overall, and remaining 1st in class.

Hour 5 Classification

20 minutes remaining for my stint. Snail Racing League had their fastest driver on track, and sticked behind me for the remaining of our stint. He got close to overtaking several times, but I defended our lead before ducking into the pits for the last time, and ended my stint.

Hour 6 Classification

I passed the car to DolphDrago, and he did a great job in the car, extending our lead even further. DolphDrago ended his stint, and littleregret265 got into the car. The whole team was counting on him to bring home the win. That's exactly what he did, he put in consistent laps, and brought the car home. 

Classified 4th Overall

Classified 1st in Class

This race has given me a lot of experience, and has definitely improved my mental focus. This win gave us the tickets needed to enter the Silverstone 6 Hour and the 25 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps events, where we'll be against another 13 teams. I would like to thank AJ, the organiser of GTPlanet Sportscar Series, the stewards, the drivers for being a good sport, the team: Randy, DolphDrago and littleregret, and Phisher for inviting me into Turtle Racing League! Next race: 6 Hours of Bathrust in TCN-2 in March!

No comments:

Post a Comment