GruppeM - FIA GT Championship - Silverstone
FIA GT Championship Round 3 – Race Report

A sunny Sunday at Silverstone and the Tourist Trophy at stake. This was quite an historic occasion, although the sea of tweed and headscarves in the paddock might have made you wonder if you’d not mistakenly arrived at Badminton or Burleigh. With Aston Martin racing again as a works team for the first time in decades, the only horsepower on show was underneath the bonnet, but the marque brings with it an age-old heritage and a certain class of following. So, we had one of the best crowds seen at Silverstone outside a Grand Prix weekend for years – estimates suggest over thirty thousand - and the spectators witnessed a thrilling GT race that must have rendered the two World Touring Car sprints that followed as something of an anticlimax. No matter; it was an excellent promotional opportunity for real racing, and while the Tourist Trophy landed rather appropriately in the hands of an Aston Martin one-two, the less glittering but equally important spoils in GT2 went once again to GruppeM.

This was not, however, a repeat of the Magny-Cours result of two weeks ago, when both Kenny Chen’s Porsches finished a country mile ahead of the competition. This weekend bad luck blunted the charge from Tim Sugden and Emmanuel Collard, allowing team-mates Mike Rockenfeller and Marc Lieb to romp away to a comfortable four-lap victory - over a delighted Ben Collins and Niel Cunningham, second for Embassy Racing on their FIA GT race debut. Despite a stirring final stint from Sugden, there was no hope of recovering the eight-lap deficit imposed by a split coolant hose, but it did provide some great racing entertainment.

The day had begun with such promise too. The morning warm-up saw both GruppeM cars heading out on track in full race trim, and turning in the kind of times that would have placed them first and second in GT2 had it still been qualifying. “We were on old tyres that had already done forty laps,” said Marc Lieb, pleased with his co-driver’s performance. “For Mike to do a 21.4 on full tanks was excellent.” He and Rockenfeller had tried a few tweaks in second qualifying yesterday that hadn’t proved beneficial. At the time, with pole in the bag, it didn’t matter, but with a race in prospect they’d needed to sort things out. “We changed the settings again this morning,” said Rocky. “Basically, we’ve gone back to the Q1 settings, where we know the car is good.” Clearly it worked. Emmanuel Collard in the 88 did a 1:21.7 right at the end of the fifteen minutes. “We’ve got a good racecar now,” he declared. Time would tell.

Two hours later and the stands were busy, the sun was shining, and Saturday’s chill breeze had eased. It was the perfect setting for a motor race and, with twenty-six cars on the grid, the ingredients were ideal. As the minutes counted down there was definitely an added tension and excitement in the air.

The general razzmatazz that typically accompanies these occasions – flags and banners, grid girls and hordes of milling mechanics, photographers and hangers-on – seemed to have been accentuated by intense media interest in the green cars at the front of the grid, the Astons qualifying on GT1 pole. The two GruppeM Porsches lined up side-by-side a little further back on the exit of Woodcote. Directly in front of Mike Rockenfeller stood the GT1 Lister Storm #14 with Justin Keen at the wheel, while Tim Sugden faced the rear end of Ryan Hooker’s GNM Saleen S7-R #8. Both cars would prove highly influential during the opening stages of the race.

At just after 10 am the grid was cleared and the pace car headed away towards Copse. Moments later, with a bellow and a roar, the massed ranks of sports machinery took off in pursuit for the parade lap. It would take just two minutes, but the leaders had dropped well back from the pace car by the time it pulled off into the pitlane. Holding the pack in check Darren Turner bunched up the field before flooring it just yards from the line. If the leaders were tightly packed, a gap had already opened out midfield, and Tim Sugden and Mike Rockenfeller found themselves with space to breathe, as the GT2 polesetters gunned it for the line. Sugden got the better run. “I timed the start perfectly,” he grinned. “I went over the line just behind Mike and had a really good run down the straight. I got into the corner just in front.” Rockenfeller conceded the point. “Tim almost got me, but I had the inside line and I got him back straight away.” It was actually a little more complicated than that. Justin Keen in the Storm had pulled clear of Rockenfeller, giving him room, but Sugden’s extra pace had brought him right under Hooker’s tail. “I was blocked by that Saleen coming into Copse!” he groaned. “I came within that much (demonstrating with finger and thumb) of passing Mike. I so nearly had him!”

Picking up pace out of Copse and along the short straight to Maggots, Hooker and Rockenfeller were now side-by-side, the Saleen just having the edge into Becketts. Through Ireland Rocky clung tenaciously to Hooker’s backside, and as they made the run down towards Abbey, he switched sides. Bravely taking the outside line, he left his braking as late as possible, carried the speed into the hairpin, and emerged on the other side a whisker in front. It was all he needed, and he now had the #8 Saleen exactly where he wanted him. “We know what to expect from those guys in the Saleens by now,” he explained later. “Perhaps they need more time than us to get up to speed, maybe their tyres take longer to reach temperature, I’m not sure, but I was able to get in front. I knew it would be important to get him between Tim and me.”

So the opening lap ended with Rockenfeller already a second clear of Hooker, with Sugden like a limpet under the Saleen’s rear wing, narrowly ahead of Shaun Balfe in his eponymous team’s Mosler. Keen, however, was discovering that the Storm was not handling as it should and suspected, correctly, that he’d picked up a puncture. He pitted at the end of the next lap, allowing Rockenfeller a clear view ahead. With his departure a status quo was established that would last for the next seven laps.

Rockenfeller eased clear of Hooker to begin with, but by the fifth lap the gap was visibly narrowing once more. It was as nothing, however, when compared with the progress being made by Hooker’s team-mate Paolo Roberti in the #7 GNM Saleen. The Italian had been forced to start from the pitlane, and from last place had arrived behind Sugden in fifteenth by the end of lap eight (below). Two laps later he was in front and closing down on Hooker, subsequently passing him with some ease. Suitably chastened, Hooker took advantage of the slight confusion to nip back ahead of Rockenfeller.

“All of a sudden he seemed to have more speed,” exclaimed a surprised Mike Rockenfeller. “Maybe it was the encouragement of seeing his team-mate going by!” Sugden, meanwhile, had not only pulled out a comfortable lead over Shaun Balfe but had also narrowed the gap between himself and Rockenfeller to just a couple of seconds. “There were several times when I thought, perfect! I can get him, and then something else would come along and get in the way.” Traffic would prove to be a problem throughout the race for just about everyone.

With half an hour gone Darren Turner in the leading Aston Martin came through to lap Tim Sugden, catching the #88 Porsche just before the end of lap 21, and then disposing of Mike Rockenfeller on the run down to Copse. This brought the two GruppeM cars into the thick of the leading action, and their lap times suffered accordingly – Rockenfeller’s more than most. “I had a bit of an incident with the Corvette,” he said. “He caught up with me as we were coming up to the second-to-last corner. I knew he was there, but I thought he’d wait those two corners before coming through to overtake me on the straight.” The two cars are pretty much of a pace through the tighter sections, like Brooklands and Luffield, so it was a reasonable expectation by Mike, but Anthony Kumpen had other ideas. “He just nudged into my rear wheel. I very nearly spun, but somehow I got it back,” shrugged Rockenfeller. It certainly looked a close-run thing! “I lost a bit of time but there wasn’t a lot of damage. It was a normal racing incident. It happens sometimes. I know it’s not easy for them to overtake us, especially on this short circuit, but we have the same problem with the slower cars. You’ve just got to be really careful with the traffic.”

Despite this, he and Sugden already enjoyed an advantage over Shaun Balfe in the G2 Mosler of some twenty seconds or more, and then a further 22 seconds over their next genuine rival, Neil Cunningham in the Embassy Porsche #55. Initially fourth in GT2 had been held by Jonny Kane in the Team LNT TVR, but part way through lap twenty-four he picked up a puncture and lost two laps having it replaced.

The two GruppeM Porsches continued serenely on their way for the next quarter of an hour, the gap between them varying marginally between a few car lengths and a handful of seconds.

Sugden always kept Rockenfeller in sight, even as they came through to lap the third-placed Cunningham, but it was the Yorkshireman who was first to break ranks. Two minutes over the hour, lap 45, the #88 car followed Darren Turner in the leading Aston down the pitlane to complete the first of a scheduled two pitstops, handing over to Emmanuel Collard.

The Frenchman emerged back on track just behind Cunningham, so had to repeat the exercise so recently completed by his co-driver and place the Embassy Porsche a lap down again. Rockenfeller, still circulating in the 66, waited three laps before making his first pitstop, handing over to Marc Lieb. It was an exemplary pitstop. “The guys did a great job. We gained a bit of time, for sure,” said a grateful Mike Rockenfeller. “The pitstops are very important. As a driver you can work hard to gain a few seconds in a stint, but then you can easily lose that much and more in a single pitstop. All credit to our guys, because they did a perfect job.” Unfortunately for Sugden and Collard, their stop had not gone so smoothly. “The rear left wheel stuck again in the pitstop,” explained Sugden, remembering the similar problem that had briefly cost them the lead at Magny-Cours. “That lost us maybe five seconds.”

True enough, when Lieb accelerated hard out of the pitlane having completed his driver swap, Collard was a good eight or ten seconds in arrears, and the gap was about to get bigger. “I had bad traffic early on,” confirmed Collard. “I lost a lot of ground to Marc. I also had problems with one of the Ferraris, a 575. I don’t know what his problem was, but he was running very inconsistent, sometimes slow, sometimes quick, and we very nearly crashed into Turn One. It was a very close thing. That cost me maybe six or seven seconds. After that, though, our pace was pretty much the same.” Indeed, things did seem to settle down quite well, and as the race entered its third hour, the two GruppeM cars occupied ninth and tenth overall, first and second in GT2, and enjoyed a four-lap lead over Ben Collins, now at the wheel of the Embassy GT3-RSR.

Unfortunately, the best-laid plan was about to come unravelled thanks to ‘one of those things’. Collard was actually preparing himself for the next scheduled pitstop when the call came over the radio to say that the team had spotted fluid coming from under the rear of the car.

“I had an alarm on the dash. I told them over the radio, but the water temperature was still OK, so the engine should still be fine.” It was twenty past twelve when he arrived outside the garage, and the mechanics were quick to haul the car backwards and inside. “We’d seen the water leaking out the back and called him in,” said Jerry Pyman, team manager. “There was a split hose in the engine cooling system, so we had to remove that, fit a new one, refill the system and check it before we could send the car out again.”

Everything was carried out quickly, methodically, and without any sign of alarm. “That clearly demonstrated the quality of the team,” suggested Steve Bunkhall (left). “There was no panic at all. Everyone knew their job, and they got on with it. They had that car fixed and turned round remarkably quickly. That was brilliant teamwork.”

In the meantime Collard had scrambled out and been replaced in the driver’s seat by Tim Sugden, who then made a blistering exit down the pitlane. The stop had cost them eight full laps – a deficit they had no hope of recovering in the last three-quarters of an hour.

And while all that had been happening the sister car had completed a far more routine-looking pitstop, although ‘routine’ was probably not quite the word Jerry Pyman (left) would have chosen. Lieb and Rockenfeller swapped places while the car was refuelled, and all went with typical efficiency and aplomb. As soon as the refuellers had stepped clear, the tyre-fitters leaped into action. On went the hose for the airjack, and as the car began to rise there was a resounding ‘pop’ from underneath the nose. The singleton jack at the front had risen OK, but wasn’t about to go down again without some help. Once again, there was calm efficiency and self-control. A jack was called, just in case, but the wheel swap was completed without problem. However, when the time came to drop the car back down onto the ground, only the rear jacks retracted. Unhesitatingly, swift action by the crew had the car nudged back onto all four wheels and away. Hardly a second was lost in what could have been a difficult moment. “The air jack just popped when we first raised the car,” explained Jerry. “We left the lance on there as long as we could, so that the guys changing the front wheels could complete the fitting. What we don’t want now is a puncture!”

This left Rockenfeller now leading GT2 from Ben Collins, yet to pit in the Embassy Porsche, by 2 laps, with the GNM #8 and Balfe Mosler caught between them. Tim Sugden, however, was now languishing in an uncharacteristic 20th place, and it had the potential to get worse. Just three laps after completing the repair to the coolant hose Sugden was back on the radio again to say that he thought “the back wheel’s about to fall off!” He came in at the end of the lap, the #88 ‘brattling’ loudly between the concrete walls as Tim held his finger on the rev limiter, and was met outside the garage by a frantic but evidently efficient scramble.

The engineers were quickly into action, and had the rear wheel checked, retightened, and checked again inside ten seconds. “Tim reported something wrong with the wheel, and we whacked it up again,” came the succinct explanation, as Sugden departed to the sound of squealing tyres. “It did feel exactly as if the wheel was about to fall off,” confirmed Sugden later. “I had to come in, and after the guys had tightened it up it was much better, although not 100%.”

And that, to all intents and purposes, was the end of the race in GT2. By the time everyone else had completed their stops, Rockenfeller could relax in the knowledge that he had a four-lap cushion over Cunningham, now back in the Embassy #55, and eight over Tim Sugden. “I knew we were far ahead, so I just took it easy, no risks, and maintained a constant pace. It went well.” He took the chequered flag after 129 laps and three hours’ racing. Sugden battled on gamely throughout his final stint, and had the satisfaction of passing the Embassy car one more time, but 6th in class and 19th overall was hardly where he wanted to end the day. He took it well nonetheless. “It’s racing, isn’t it? As long as we get an equal share of bad luck, I guess it’s OK. It’s a shame, but we’ll still get to fight another day.” Marc Lieb was one of the first to come over and offer his commiserations, giving his team-mate a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We don’t want to win like that.” Tim was quick with the reposte. “No, we don’t want you to win like that either!”

As Marc Lieb admitted, the dice had tumbled in favour of the #66 this time. “It’s good to win, of course it is, but we were really very lucky. Mike had that incident with the Corvette, and then there was the problem with the air jack. That could have been serious. Luckily for us it made no difference.” Emmanuel Collard was in a very quiet and reflective mood, clearly disappointed to have been in the car when it suffered the split hose, and also conscious of the time lost to Marc after the run-in with the Ferrari. Neither was his fault, of course. This is racing. It happens. Steve Bunkhall understood the situation all too well. “From our point of view (he’s chief engineer on the #66), that was a really good race. We stopped exactly on schedule, and everything went perfectly to plan. The pitstops were a great team effort every time; they were excellent, but it’s just a real shame about the other car. They showed good pace, but hit some bad luck. That’s the way it goes sometimes.”

Next stop Imola, and if the championship goes according to form, perhaps it will be Sugden and Collard’s turn to smile.
Marcus Potts