PK Sport At Sebring – Wednesday Testing Report
According To Plan
How often can you really say that in racing?

It’s been very hot (87 degrees) and very humid in Sebring today. The kind of weather when most sensible people will be sitting with their feet up, a cool drink in hand, taking it easy. The PK Sport Team aren’t like that though – in place of the feet up posture you’ll find them with their head in a hot engine bay or under the car, tweaking, adjusting, checking and cleaning. Oh they’ll emerge red-faced and sweating, but they still come back for more.

Notice Robin Liddell’s personal sponsor’s decal, on the front left corner: the Scot is supported by the choristers at a preparatory school in Ealing, West London.

The battle and the slog are a big part of what makes this kind of motorsport so engaging, the team work, the constant search for the best balance to suit all the drivers.

“It’s always a compromise” says David Warnock, “The settings, the handling, even the seating position, when you have drivers of different sizes.” Warnock is six feet two inches tall.

It’s Team Owner Mike Pickup’s job to analyse the feedback from the drivers and decide how best to accommodate those potentially clashing ‘wants’ and ‘needs’. It’s not easy, and there’s always a new list of tweaks and changes to deal with after every session.

“We’re always chasing the next change to find more and more time,” says Robin Liddell: typical racing driver, never satisfied – and quite rightly too. He’s basically happy though: Pirellis are performing well, car is getting better and better…perhaps he’d prefer it a tad cooler though.

“We found a change which has helped enormously with an understeer problem we had yesterday, but every moment of track time is valuable to see whether changes have worked and to see whether there’s something else we can try.”

It’s not as easy as it sounds. To compare performance you need data that matches conditions and with a race field of 56 cars traffic, both faster and slower, is always going to be a confounding factor. Liddell and Warnock are seen (below) studying the data that helps them gain precious fractions.

David Warnock explains what it's like on the circuit: “I was last here in 1997 and there have been a number of minor changes made since then, so it’s a case of re-learning the circuit. The circuit is unbelievably busy, every single lap has been compromised by either coming up on a slower car or moving off line to let a prototype fly by. It certainly keeps it interesting out there!”

So its hot, dusty, you can’t drive at the pace you’d like and there are constant compromises to make – why do these people keep coming back for more?

“It’s a challenge, something inside you needs that. I still love doing it, challenging myself against my own standards and against others of a similar standard. No other form of racing out there allows you to measure yourself against the best guys, in similar cars and still race wheel to wheel with guys of equal ability. There is always a battle or a dice going on throughout the entire race. ”

The constant challenge to compromise and move forward is however bearing fruit for PK Sport, the #60 car finished the afternoon practice session in sixth place in class, its times improving as the session progressed.

The morning was equally successful, the car setting 2:09.326 before lunch, 2:09.204 this afternoon. Two Alex Job Porsches, the faster Orbit car, a Petersen Porsche and one Ferrari were quicker than PK’s 911. Sixth will do very nicely though.

This is, unquestionably, the most competitive GT class grid on the planet, around 20 cars are perfectly capable of competing for a podium position, and the two PK Sport entered Porsche 911s are already right amongst them.

But there’s a way to go yet with a final pre-qualifying practice session tomorrow morning the job list of checking, tweaking and adjusting is still as long as it was this morning. Those tenths of seconds need finding and there’s a team of PK Sport mechanics ready, willing and able to help find them.

Then it will be qualifying in the afternoon. That will be Robin Liddell’s task. More from the team late on Thursday, including Piers Masarati’s thoughts so far, and the progress made by the second PK entry.