Welcome to Monterey, California, the second event of the Endurance league is held on Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca circuit, a 40 minutes sprint race.
A short a completely different track compared to the first event in Le Mans, the famous Turn 8 and 8A combination, popularly referred to as the Corkscrew, is considered one of the motorsport world’s most challenging turns, due to the drop in elevation as well as its blind crest and apex on the uphill approach.
No places where to get some relax on this track which has a various munbers of others challenging curves like the T2 with its difficult and technical double-apex (named Andretti hairpin) or T9 that has been renamed ‘Rainey Curve’ in honor of 500cc Grand Prix motorcycle racing.
Hold your breath and push as hard as possible, avoid mistakes can be the key for a great team result.

QUALIFYING RESULT

A short track where the gap is not so big between P1 and P2 and also between GT1 and GT2.
Let’s start from P1 where we’ve got Jose Espinosa and Inigo Otermin respectivly 3rd and 4th, Kaillera is 6th and Kamilo62 11th. Well qualified for a top positions race.
On P2 we have Nemesis and Walter976 on 7th and 8th position while Avni Tumay is 18th with no much time to practice.
On GT2 our Bartix got the 5th place, hard for him on such technical track but at the end he improved his pace getting at just 1.6 secs from the poleman, well done.

RACE RESULT

Too many contenders for this short track so the decision is to split drivers on 2 heats with more than 20 drivers each, logical choice.
For our team Kaillera and Avni Tumay could not take part of the race.

HEAT 1
The heat 1 is including for P1 Jose Espinosa and Kamilo62 and for P2 Nemesis.

The race of Kamilo62 lasted only 6 laps for his own error, he spun damaging the car and on his way to the pits spun again losing the back wing. Race ended, DNF.

The race of our 2 others drivers needs a special mention, let’s start from Jose Espinosa, our mexican team mate was easily 2nd not so far away from a very fast Frozen with no problem to control his position until lap 14 when he spun exiting from T2, no damage for him, he kept his position but Mymini with a P2 car was impressivly fast and was closing the gap behind him.

On lap 21 a small mistake permitted to Mymini to pass him, 3rd place now, not happy for this our driver tried to recover his position attacking on last turn of lap 23, he braked a bit too late touching Mymini and made it spun, fairly he waited Mymini to pass him back but for unknown reason he refused to take his position back. Who took advantage by this situation is Bogdanis that was behind them, he got very close, we now have Josè 2nd, Mymini 3rd and Bogd 4th one next to the other.

The last 10 laps of these 3 drivers were simply amazing (watch replay if you can!), on lap 24 Bogdanis was 3rd and was attacking Josè on last turn, Josè was a bit wide and Bogdanis pushed him hardly off track (too aggressive, why not disputed?), Josè was 4th with a damaged car but on the same lap approching the corkscrew he first passed Mymini and than Bogdanis with an amazing move getting back his 2nd place. What a battle, really enjoying!

9 laps to go is still a long way, on lap 27 Josè made a small mistake getting overtaken by Bogdanis, on next lap he tried to pass him back on corkscrew, again a contact between them (no fault from both sides this time, race accident), Josè spun, went in 4th position and the car seems to have some bigger damage this time.
On lap 30 he got reached by the couple CasH plus Nemesis, both of them passed him easily, the remaining 3 laps are spent defending his position from Zunik.
A 6th place for Josè Espinosa, disappointing we can say but he has shown all his potential, keep on like this mate, you’ll get much better results in future.

Let’s look to Nemesis now, on P2 he had a safe start and on first 8 laps he went from 9th to 7th position due to other driver mistakes and few laps later was 8th getting very close to CasH who has a P1 car.
From this moment CasH and Nemesis have always been very close till the end of the race, they gained another position because of a spin of another car in front, on lap 17 Nemesis reached and overtook Zunik quite easily getting the 6th place, the rest of the race was fast but a bit quite, too risky trying to push to attack CasH.
On lap 30 another position gained as Josè was really damaged and could not defend his position, Nemesis ended his race 5th on his heat and 2nd overall on his P2 class, what a wonderful result, congratulation!

HEAT 2
On this heat we have Inigo Otermin on P1, Walter976 on P2 and Bartix on GT2.

After a nice start Bartix was 13th on first lap, he knew his pace was not so competitive so he started to drive as consistently as possible avoiding mistakes but a very unlucky episode on lap 6 involved both our drivers Bartix and Inigo. There has been a collision while Inigo was trying to lap Bartix, unfortunately Inigo was suffering of lag problems, Bartix moved on the outside to let him pass but… CRASH! Bartix was hitted hardly from his back going off track against the guardco, his race was ended and only by luck Inigo didn’t get much damage to his car.

Bartix took the fault on his side, it’s not completely true, we should take more care when overtaking/lapping a team mate, really a pity, let’s look forward.

The race of Walter976 was probably not enough aggressive as it was willing to cross the finish line after the DNF of the first event, he had a bad start due to a mistake with the speed limiter losing a lot of positions.
Initially Walter was keeping behind BIzdafar then he decided to let him pass as he was way faster, at about half race he had nice battle with Mihai Calota, but Mihai blew his engine when they were getting really close, no contact and one position gained.
Second half of the race was a bit quite, drivers in front were too fast for him, he wasn’t happy with his car setup so he relaxed himself and brought the car to the finish line, 8th on the heat and 8th overall on his class, first points in the league for him.

Remarkable race by our boss Inigo Otermin, the qualify was already promising but the race was amazing.
He suffered for lag problem during all race, (probably this is the main reason of the collision with Bartix on lap 6) but he was very quick, he even took the lead of the heat on lap 1 but than Okan overtook him.
The lag gave him problems specially while overtaking other drivers (another contact during race) but apart for this his race was clean without mistakes, always following Okan and even closing the gap on the last part of the race, at the end he was just less than 2 seconds from him.
He was 2nd on his heat and would have been 2nd overall on his class but the league admins decided to punish him with 1 minute delay as he ruined the race of a couple of drivers. Non completely his fault has he had connection/lag problems, anyway he was 4th overall on his class. One word: impressive!

————————————————————

P1 driver standing sees Inigo Otermin as our best driver in 7th place followed by Durielk, Zoneur and Josè Espinosa.
On P2 Nemesis is 5th position and Walter976 13th, Bartix is 2nd on GT2.

Nice team improvements, the league is getting better and hopefully we’ll continue in this way, the next event is the wonderful Nordschleife circuit in Germany, a circuit that is about 8 minutes long difficult to learn due to his lenght, again a big challenge for all of us