Pippa Mann – Brands Hatch
This weekend was my third ever race weekend in a GT car the final race of the Porsche Carrera Cup GB which I have been competing in briefly alongside my World Series by Renault commitments.
The previous week, my schedule had finally allowed me to do a test day at Brands Hatch prior to the race weekend. As it turned out the “test day” constituted four sessions of running time amounting to just under two hours in the car. We were also testing with other cars on track, many of which were a lot slower than the Porsches. When the speeds between cars testing are very different it makes hard work for all the drivers, both of the slower cars and the faster cars, and it means the rate at which you close on some cars can be scarily fast. For everyone it means that lap times don’t really count, because you never have a clear lap and it can make it more difficult to judge where you are. However, it did enable us to try some things on the car, and come into the weekend knowing that we had the car in roughly the right place.
The first official test session of the weekend started a little slowly, but by the end of the second session, and with a little more work on the car – things were starting to look quite good. 20 cars had turned up for the final race of the year, and out of that 20 I was the 12th fastest overall but still about half a second down on really breaking into that top group. The car felt good, the tyres were coming in nice and early in the run (when the new rubber is still at it’s best) and the goal was to try and go one better than Knockhill, despite the bigger field, and put the car 10th on the grid for both races.
The following day qualifying wasn’t until 2pm in the afternoon, so there was lots of the time to hang around and get a bit twitchy and nervous! I used the time to find some data, which I was then able to look at with the Eurotech engineer who has been looking after me and Porsche. There were a couple of corners where I was braking a bit too early, and one where I just wasn’t quite going fast enough, but other than that the data didn’t look too far out. Getting a clear two laps (one for each race) around the twisty and short Brands Hatch Indy circuit would be the key to a good qualifying.
At 2pm we rolled the car out and were one of the first people out on track while some of the bigger names stayed in the pitlane. The idea was that there would be less cars on track, which would make it easier to find a space. The plan worked, and I set a time which would hold at 10th fastest after everybody including all the quick drivers who had been hanging back, had done their first run.
I found yet more space on the second tyre run – the car was good, the plan worked, and I improved my time just enough to move me up ninth for the first race and eighth for the second. This should have been a cause for some black-slapping and serious smiling before the first race later in the afternoon, as we had not only achieved our goal, but bettered it! However, qualifying came with a sting in the tail. Immediately after setting the two fast laps I felt something wrong with the gearbox and there was the horrible sound of metal rattling where it shouldn’t be… The punishment the gearbox had taken at Knockhill, especially in the second race where the clutch was failing by the end, had come back to take it’s toll, and there was a race against time to get the spare Porsche UK gearbox into the back of my car to replace my broken one before the start of the race.
At this point I have to say a huge thank you to Porsche UK – due to Eurotech also being involved in the BTCC, we run a very lean operation, and with one mechanic, there is no way we would have been ready in time. However Porsche UK sent one of their mechanics down immediately to help my mechanic, and then two more came and joined as soon as their other duties were done. Once the touring car qualifying finished, the Eurotech BTCC boys also came down to our tent and descended on the car. We rolled into the holding area before the start of the race with under five minutes to spare… It doesn’t get much closer than that!
The races were not so good for us, with two DNF’s, however we had the speed, we qualified well and that’s something I have to be very happy about. Our performance was competitive at Brands Hatch, and this was only our third weekend!
Next week I’m back out in the World Series Car at Estoril, and I now need to change the focus and become a single-seater driver again. I like Estoril, and I’m hoping that when we put the car down there it’ll be the same car I had in Nürburgring and Monza, and that I can do something interesting with it. However, looking back on this weekend as I leave it behind, I think what sums it up is actually a quote my World Series team mate Geido (van der Garde) uses whenever anything goes wrong:
“Yeah. But I was still quick!”
Yours Pippa