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Masters of Endurance: 12 hours of Kyoto GP

By 3id News | Oct 14, 2009 18:14 UTC | 825 Views

Masters of Endurance (MoE), the name itself says it all. The most prestigious league for years now, the place to be and the one to win, is back for a 5th season.

There was a dilemma even before teams headed to the track, as they were to decide on their car choice. The Series administrators decided to give the FZR 35kg of ballast in the GT1 class, instead of the 20kg used in IGTC. This meant the XRR became the weapon of choice for the coming season.

Many might have noticed our three wins in a row with the FZR in the last three IGTC races, so the FZR would be an obvious choice for MoE too however after much deliberation our GT1 line up chose to use the XRR despite a lack of experience with it competitively other than Hugo Luis who used it in an LFSBR league. Our GT1 line up consisted of well known IGTC duo Hugo Luis and Dave Williams joined by Jack Basford for this round.

This season we decided to enter the GT2 class for the first time in MoE. The restrictions remained the same as last year for the GT2 class, which meant the FZR remained competitive; hence it was only natural for us to select this car for our first shot at the GT2 title. Our GT2 line up included Nikifor Đaković and Karolis Kliaudaitis who have had a big part in our OLFSL effort. Our newest member Laszlo Kotrocz would be joining them behind the wheel

Qualifying

GT1:
Hugo showed great promise leading up to the qualifying session so the team had well placed faith in him securing a good position in qualifying and he did not disappoint. Hugo managed to get the XRR onto pole position in Q1 and secured it with a fine lap of 2:13.76 in Q2, this would be the 2nd time My3id Gaming got pole position in MoE.

GT2:
For Q1 Niki headed onto track to qualify in the GT2 FZR. Having put all of their efforts into preparing for the race our GT2 team did not manage to create a decent qualifying setup. This meant Niki could only manage 3rd in Q1. Karolis would be up for Q2 and despite improving on Niki’s efforts by more than 3 tenths of a second it was still only good enough for 3rd place.

Race

The race start went pretty well for both of our cars as they both came out of turn 1 in second position in class. After slipping to second position on a chaotic start, Jack reeled in spdoRacing and regained the lead after a few laps. Meanwhile in GT2, Niki, having trouble with traffic managed to obtain the lead just after the hour mark. Jack built a comfortable lead in GT1 before a shock puncture about 2 hours into the race eroded that. But with a better pit-stop than F1RST Racing 3id got back the lead swiftly. Dave unfortunatley caused a DT penalty due to his in game name being incorrectly formatted, still our lead remained as Hugo was able to build a gap in his stint which Dave and Jack built upon. It should have been a comfortable victory from there for GT1, however, it became clear that there was not enough fuel to reach the finish. But with a safe gap back to 2nd Jack cruised and shortshifted to the flag, deliberately slowing on the final lap to cross the finish seconds after the 12 hour limit was reached.

In GT2 the guys kept the lead even after an incident involving Laszlo 5 hours into the race where the car acquired some fairly severe damage but as this happened Sirius were flying through the field and they were already in 2nd position by then. We realised then that we could not afford mistakes like that anymore. When Karolis took over the car he was pushing to the limits to keep a gap to the guys in Sirius who had an extremely good pace. This however meant that Karolis found himself in slight misfortune while he was driving on the edge of the cars potential and slightly damaged the car in his stint and caused slightly slower pace for the rest of the race. Our initial analysis showed that the damage would not slow us down by too much so we decided not to fix it. However over time the damage increased and caused odd handling issues but it was too late to repair the damage and maintain the lead. In the final segments of the race the damage still increasing caused two punctures for Karolis in his 2nd run of stints, we had to fix the damage for the final stint so as to not risk another puncture; this meant however that we would only be able to cross the finish-line in 2nd.

The next round is to be held on the streets of South City where we'll be aiming to continue our great start to the season.