grandam-dirk-werner-virginia-dominik-farnbacher

Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series, GT class Virginia International Raceway

The weekend started pretty good. We knew that we had restricted time to set up the car because there were only two free practice sessions. In the first practice session, we were fastest in GT and the car was feeling really good, I think because we already had a good setup from last year. We were all looking forward to the race when my co-driver Dominik Farnbacher took the GT pole position in qualifying. It was the first step to a good result in the race.

The car really felt good for a race distance. Dominik showed in the first part of the race that he was able to go the pace of the other fast cars. Everything was looking good, then unfortunately, we had bad luck and Dominik was caught in a race situation where he couldn't avoid going off the track, and the radiator was damaged.

We had to pit and the crew did a good job changing the radiator - they were quick and we were lucky because there was a yellow [caution period]. We wouldn't have lost many positions, but then we had another problem with the water pump leaking.

That meant we had to go back to our trailer and change the water pump. We lost 25 laps, so there was no chance to compete in the race any more. I just went out at the end of the race to drive my 30 minutes and get minimum points.

It's really disappointing to see that we lost so many points in the championship. I think this would have been a good race to close up to the [class-leading] 07 Pontiac, but now we've dropped back quite a lot. We have to go on doing our best and I'm sure we'll get to a situation where we can win some races.

By Dirk Werner

- dirk-werner.net -

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