Official practice begins today in Malaysia for the 12 hour Enduro at Sepang.
Thursday, August 6, 2009, 11:10 PM
Posted by Administrator
As there was only 1 official practice session scheduled for this race weekend, our team has been here a few days earlier this week preparing for the 12 hour endurance race at Sepang International Circuit.
I am competing for Team PCS Racing and will be driving with one of Australia's top GT drivers, Craig Baird, and the team owner, Mok Weng Sun of Malaysia. We took the overall race victory here 1 year ago with this team and we are back here to look and repeat the success. Everything is exactly the same this year except that Alex Davison has been replaced by Baird after Davison had testing commitments with his Australian V8 team back in Australia.
We are running the same 2008 Porsche GT3 RSR with the Chrome paint and orange dragon livery. The car has again been prepared with lots of love and care which has given us a great car for this weekends race.
After running the car on Tuesday to prepare the setup of the car, the team replaced the driveshafts, brakes, and gearbox in preparation for the race. Today, we broke in the new parts before pushing the car a bit to work on setup.
Although we did struggle with oversteer during the session, our team still managed to put in a time of 2.07.35 which was good enough for the overall fastest time in free practice.
This years race has a wide variety of cars including an Aston Martin GT2, the new Ginetta GT car, radicals, and even a Mosler GT which typically is a very high downforce car. Not to mention that there are also several quick Porsche's including last years runner-up, the Kaneca Hong Leong GT3 RSR from Malaysia, and also the LKM sponsored Porsche Cup S driven my Keita Sawa and the two Siu Brothers of Hong Kong.
This race is typically a hard race due to the heat in Malaysia. With the humidity high and temperatures often reaching 40 degrees, it is a race that punishes both the car and driver.
We are well prepared for this race and the car is quick. The most important thing is that we drive the race smartly and stay out of trouble. With over 50 cars on the grid, it will be a race that will have alot of traffic combined with good competition. It will be up to us to put in a good performance and bring the home after the 12 hours of racing!
More updates to come throughout this wknd and hopefully I can upload some pictures of our beautiful car...when I mean beautiful, I truly mean a car that looks damn good!