FFR PDG GTM Racing at Willow Springs 2/12/22

[crash]

First race of the 2022 endurance racing season.

We have a bunch of new items that we will be testing. Some by choice, and some because of necessity because of issues brought on by The Wuhan.

Should be fun.

More to follow...

[crash]

We tried out a new driver this weekend...a 24 year old named Tommy McCarthy...https://www.tommymccarthyracing.com/

He was great. We were talking about setup items right away, and his first session out he was wanting to make the car go faster!

Qualified 5th and finished 4th, but as usual, the finishing position does not tell the story. Lots of new items on the car. Some worked well, and some will be thrown in the circular file, never to be used again.

Not going to name product names, but we did try out a product for holding the rear deck lid on that would be much more aerodynamically efficient. It failed during the first session at 130+ MPH. Completely obliterating the rear deck. Unfortunately the debris also cut a right rear tire. This was after a few laps in the first morning session but the impacts from this would be felt for the entire day.

We were running a different brand set of tires for practice and I did not bring any spares of those because, well, I did not foresee any issue like this arising from a window hold down, so we had to use one of our spare Hankooks on the right rear for the rest of the warm up sessions.

Tommy still went fast even with a mixed set of tires!

Qualifying went well and we ended up 5th out of a 24 car field.

First hour of the race went very well with Tommy battling our arch rival GT3 Cup Porsche(who was also the series champion last year) until we had a rear brake issue. Turns out that the right rear brake fittings had been slightly loosened during the tire issue and we had not caught that when looking everything over. Not a huge issue and we ended up getting the car back out on track for the last hour of the race, but obviously not what we were looking for as far as a finishing result. 4th in class and 22nd overall.

We are looking at this year's Western Endurance Racing Championship series races as preparing us for the 2022 25 Hours of Thunderhill race and this race did a LOT towards that goal. While the event could have gone better for us, it certainly could have been far worse considering all the new items on the car combined with a relatively inexperienced(in the GTM anyway) driver. Congratulations to Tommy for doing great, especially given the circumstances.

Next race is at Fontana. March 26th.

[Matt Ries]

I always enjoy the reports of the PDG GTM, thanks for the updates and please continue with the visual commentary!

Matt

[beeman]

Thanks for keeping us in the loop with the PDG car!