As this race lasted 6 hours, we will have it a tad more detailed today. In the week before the race are two qualifying sessions lasting one hour each. This time one of the new members, Marcel “SandMan” Krause took care of that and placed the car 3rd in the grid. Marco “Jay” Schade, previously mentioned SandMan, Hendrik “b0nd” von Eye and Nils “n1lyn” Naujoks were our nominees for the upcoming race.

Three hours before the actual start they were again putting their hands on the setup to squeeze out one or even just half of a tenth out of the car per lap. Jay chose to drive the first stint, which usually lasts about an hour depending on tire- and fuel usage, before you need to enter the pits, change tires and refuel. So for a race lasting six hours you would need 6 stints, causing 5 pit stops. But, we had a different plan.

The track-characteristic causes a fuel consumption of 2 litres per lap, which is exactly 2 % of the possible load. That makes it possible to drive 50 laps overall with an average lap time of… ok, it gets too detailed here maybe. To make it short: The fuel lasts for 1:15h and in order to save one pit stop, that costs about 30-40 seconds, we tried to make the tires last just as long as the fuel. By reducing the camber, which is the angle between tire and road, we were able to decrease tire usage to a minimum, without the lap times rising too much.

After one hour all teams using their tires a lot more, entered the pits the first time to refuel approximately 80 liters, which means that at all times during the race our car is about 20kg heavier, except for the 15 minutes we were able to stay out of pits longer than the others. N1lyn was taking over the car after Jay’s first pit stop with just a little damage from several contacts with lapped down cars or walls, of which you have a lot on a narrow city track.

We were on a solid 2nd place after 2 hours, which allowed us to repair the damage in pits extending the second stop to about 60 seconds. The Mercury Team was leading by nearly a lap already and it didn’t seem very possible to us to get passed again. But, and that is what makes long races so thrilling, also Mercury had to repair a lot of damage twice throwing them into the back of the field.

All of a sudden we had a big lead. And it got even worse… for the other teams. Our tactic to save one stop ended up in success. While the others had to go to the pits again, we just stood on track with b0nd and SandMan doing a stint each, before n1lyn again took the car for the last.

After 6 hours, 236 laps and about 6.600 gearshifts SK-Gaming carried the AMD sign on the cowl over the finish line and celebrated the first victory with the new team and just by the way banned a long series of 2nd places to the past.

The next great event will be the 24h race on January 24th.

For more information check: www.mastersofendurance.eu