Much has been said, and written, about the ruleset for the Spa 24 Hours which, in recent years, has seen more and more restrictive boundaries put around a significant number of aspects of racing which previously allowed trams to display excellence.
Many of the changes have been made in pursuit of cost control, negating the teams’ advantages from investing in better and better equipment to draw an advantage over their opposition.
One such change in (relatively) recent years has been the introduction of the “Technical” pit stop and in this particular area cost control and safety was the target.
On some GT3 cars, brake discs and pads can be changed much quicker than on others.
To effectively ‘balance’ this, each car must make one Technical Pit Stop of at least five minutes from pit-in to pit-out – that stop must have begun before the start of the 22nd hour.
There is still though advantage to be drawn from this process, and there are surprises too about just how easy – or otherwise – it is to complete the process in what appears, on the face of it, to be a generous 5 minute allowance!
DSC unpicked the task with Kessel Racing’s long-standing Team Manager Tiziana Borghi:
“The first thing to remember,” she said, ” is it is NOT five minutes to change the brakes!
“It is 5 minutes from pit in to pit out. And at the Spa 24 Hours we are using both pit lanes (the ‘F1’ and ‘Endurance’ pits) and that takes quite a large part of the allowed time.
“From pit-in to pit out is 1 kilometre so at 50 km/h that is already one minute and 10 seconds – even without stopping – from the total allowance. Add to that 1 – 1.5 seconds for the stop.
“Then we have to fuel the car, that takes another 44 seconds before we can put the car into the garage, which itself takes around five seconds in, and five seconds out to do the brake change. Already we are over two minutes that isn’t available to us.
So that leaves under three minutes. But, incredibly, Kessel Racing don’t need nearly that long!
“We put the car into the garage so that we can use more of the crew members to help – and, with the new Ferrari, we only need to change the front brakes over the Spa 24 Hours.
“If we have no problems, and no other work that needs to be done, we can change the disks and pads in under one minute.”
DSC can confirm that was the case this time around with the stop on the #8 Ferrari. Alerted to the fact that the car was using the opportunity of an early morning Full Course Yellow to undertake the stop, we made our way down to the garage from the press room, a walk of around 2 minutes – by the time the DSC Editor stepped into the garage the car was being prepped to be taken back out onto the pit apron, brake change already complete!
The car was then held, awaiting time, for around 60 seconds on the apron before being released, the time at pit out 5:00.2 seconds – all but perfect! That compared to several other front-running cars with their stops completed in the 5:01s, 5:02s and 5:03s – time gained against all of them.
In turn that kept the better placed of the two Kessel Ferraris in the hunt for a podium finish in the stacked Bronze Cup class, retaining a position on the class lead lap before the car was eliminated late in the race by contact from Valentino Rossi’s BMW after the Italian star had lost control, rejoining the circuit and hitting the Ferrari.
Not the result the team wanted, but as Tiziana explained so well, the game on it-lane is no longer about being able to take advantage, it’s about performing the tasks that you can perform as close to perfection as you can.
