RaceDepartment Le Mans 24H

LIVE july 13th-14th
The RDLMS4 season came to Le Mans for this year’s 24 Hours endurance race. Simracing For Holland was present with two cars, be competing in the GT1 and GT2 classes.

rfactor.sfh.chevrolet.corvette.c6r.lm.hires

GT1 Corvette C6R

Andras Kiraly
Bert Knops
Marcel Offermans
Ruud de Wit


rfactor.sfh.porsche.997.imsa2008.hires

GT2 Porsche 997

Wilfred van den Brink
Rudy van Buren
Dennis Douna
Robin Verdegaal


Race


Registration of the full 24 hours of the event.

15.00

GT2 – Wilfred van den Brink started in P1 and slowly built a lead of 10+ seconds to Black Road Racing’s Thibaut Vernice.

GT1 – Starting from P5 the SFH Corvette quickly climbed up to P3 and even P2 after one of the front runners ran into trouble. The Skype Racing Corvette followed with slightly more wing and aggressively tried to pass, resulting in multiple car contacts and damage to the Corvette’s left, rear and right bodywork. After a while SFH broke lose.

After an hour suddenly Andras’ visuals fell away, forcing him to leave the server. Bert Knops sat out the ten minutes penalty but was kicked from the race when he rejoined. After another kick, the team is contemplating an early retirement.

16.00

GT1 retired – For the first time in years the team decided to withdraw from a race.

GT2 – Fifteen minutes into the third hour an anonymous LMP2 pushed the SFH Porsche out of Indianapolis with severe damage as a result. Loss of the front splitter forced Wilfred van den Brink to make a repair stop just two laps into a new stint. SFH falls down from P1 to P7.

17.00

The Porsche just passed Greg Hall and Rudy Cuppen and was running in P4. We’re on a different pitwindow than the front runners.

In another pitstop round we’ve passed Stephane Pras. At 17.30 our Porsche passed Szymon Tott’s. We’re now running in second place in class, genuinely!

Simracing For Holland Porsche now in P1 in class! In the last 15 minutes all three of the leading cars somehow ran into trouble. We were fourth, now we’re in the lead!

18.00

Still in first place, running a minute in front of ORM Corse whose Marco Felix is doing fast lap times. Third in class: Brigata Orso with Sander van Schaik behind the wheel. 18 hours to go.

21.00

Wilfred van den Brink almost caught up with ORM Corse when their pitstop went wrong. The SFH Porsche now leads the entire GT2 field by more than a lap.

00.00

We’re still running without front hood, but it doesn’t cost as much time. The Porsche was running almost three complete laps ahead of Simrace Vereniging Nederland in second place. At midnight Rudy van Buren was scheduled to take over the car, but on the change something went wrong. Rudy had to leave for five minutes and when he came back Robin Verdegaal had already left the pits. The next lap, Verdegaal came back in to complete the driver change.
After the two stops for change we had one and a half lap advantage left, but SRVN is going to have to make their stop too, which could take us back more than two laps ahead.

01.00

Server crash! We’re waiting for the safetycar to bring us back in the race, in the knowledge that we have a luxury three laps advantage over Brigata Orso in second place in GT2.

06.30

Server crash! Another safetycar period neutralises the race.

11.00

Our original attack plan was to make the difference through the night. Having tested for pitch black conditions paid off with laptimes of around 4 second per lap faster than any of the other GT2 cars. The lead in class now has almost doubled: from 3 to nearly 6 laps advantage over the second car in class, which is now the ORM Corse machine.

FINISH

WE WON!
Apart from our night surge, this race has been all about keeping out of trouble. At night we were able to build the gap but at that point we were ahead by three laps anyway, most of which came from on track incidents or technical trouble from the rest of the teams.

Especially in the first few hours, when we were trying to get back up in GT2 after being pushed into the guardrails and had to repair heavy damage, we were watching in amazement while our car climbed up the rankings. One after the other leading GT2 car ran into trouble and without really making a difference, we came back in the lead.

The GT1 story is a totally different one though. So much trouble so early in the race drew the picture of twentytwo hours worth of dangling in the back of the field. Passing cars but not making up positions. After all that’s happened in this race you could ask yourself how far up the Corvette could have climbed, but then again it might not have been able to stay out of trouble itself either.

Endurance spirit has won this race. Drive fast, but drive safe. Let faster cars go on the straights, before you enter the next turn where an incident is much more likely to happen.

 


Results

GT1 - SFH Corvette C6R - DNF
GT2 - SFH Porsche 997 - 1st

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