What a great debut of the season! Couldn’t really ask for better with 2 wins out of 2 races! VIR has always been one of my favorite tracks and this time it really treated us well! Everything went great from practice, qualifying and the races!

It was our first Pirelli World Challenge outing and I really liked the atmosphere of the championship. The competition is surely tough and the GT3 class is filled with very fast drivers. The GT Cup class in which we compete features a direct competition between all the “Cup” cars: Porsche Cup, Ferrari Challenge and obviously Lamborghini Super Trofeo. In order to make the cars all equal the “Balance of Performance” system is used. That means our car has some restrictors, a mandatory ride height and some weight ballast. This of course doesn’t make it easier to drive, so the team had to play around with the settings a bit.

I think in the end we found a good balance because the car felt quite good. In Race 1 my teammate Yuki started from P2 of class and maintained the distance with the leader. At the driver change mandatory pitstop, the team did an amazing job and we gained a lot of time. Once I jumped in, I started to push as much as possible in order to catch the leader and was able to close contact a few laps later. After a brief battle, a full course yellow freezed the positions for a few laps. I was hoping the caution ended the soonest as possible! And when it did, I was able to manage an overtake at the restart, and to pull away enough to secure a comfortable gap. Winning at the first race was for sure a nice feeling!

Race 2 saw me start, and traffic with the GT3 cars in front of me battling it out, everything went very well and I was able to pull away a few seconds from our next competitor, but a few cautions with the safety car on track meant that our gap basically was down to zero. We had change strategy and to pit in late with me trying to make the most of the laps after the safety car was out. I was able to arrive in the pits with a small gap, and from then Yuki took over. He did an amazing job in his stint, maintaining the pace and staying in the lead. With 6 minutes to go, another caution was called by Race direction and this time the period was so long, we ended the race under full course yellow. That meant for us victory n. 2!

The team did a great job this weekend and I can’t wait for the next race in order to try extend our lead in the championship! Our next race will be at Canadian Tire Motorsports Park next 19th to 21st of May.