Highcroft Hat-Trick
It was another great weekend and another great performance by Highcroft Racing at Salt Lake City, our hat-trick of wins securing an eleven point lead in the American Le Mans Series LMP class championship fight.
The momentum from the last few series races has been great for the team. Going to Le Mans and building on that experience has made the team even stronger and that really showed in Utah.
We knew that we had to have a car with less drag for Utah, otherwise we were in trouble. Having got the new low downforce aero kit we unfortunately didn’t get an opportunity to test it. It’s not the same configuration as we ran at Le Mans, it’s a higher downforce version – a kind of in between, and it took a little time to figure it out as we needed to do things differently.
The guys did a fantastic job to get it balanced quickly to give us a good race car capable of winning. I was really happy just being able to sit back and look at how the team, and Simon and I, operate.
It’s a special time as everything is gelling together; everyone is happy in their role and the chemistry which makes success is definitely happening at Highcroft. Everyone’s on it and we need to be to win the championship.
Any sort of points lead is vital in this series as with only nine races one DNF could completely ruin your championship hopes. We’ve got a busy schedule coming up so it’s important for us to continue to do the job we are doing with the focus we have. We don’t have to change a lot, just keep improving here and there.
The next round at Lime Rock will be Highcroft’s home event. We always look forward to racing there as we have such fantastic support from the local fans and of course family and friends of team members who live nearby also come along.
We’ve been able to give a good showing there in the last couple of years. Victory in 2008 and my pass on Timo Bernhard is always a good memory and we looked promising for the win last year until we got a puncture. We know the HPD ARX-01c is very capable of doing the job at Lime Rock and we’re all looking forward to it.
It’s quite a tight, twisty, track more like a street circuit without walls than anything else, which should favour the LMP2 cars. The Highcroft car has always done well at street circuits, of course we won at Long Beach, as it’s certainly more nimble than the LMP1 cars, so that will definitely help us. But you never know in this series and we have just got to make sure we don’t go there being too complacent.
I don’t really have favourite circuits but I do enjoy racing at Lime Rock. I always like turn 1 as it’s a challenging corner that you really have to commit to and the resurfacing has made the grip loads of fun.
Regardless of it being our home race, we’ll continue to practice and refine what we do. We certainly did an outstanding job in the pits at Salt Lake and that’s always such an important part of racing in this series.
I’ll actually be taking to the track before official practice begins on Friday at Lime Rock, to help the team’s Miles to End Malaria campaign. On Tuesday, July 20, I’ll be giving one lucky winner a special five-lap driving lesson in one of Lime Rock’s BMW M3s. I’ll also be doing a couple of hot laps to complete the experience, so that’s going to be a pretty cool prize for one lucky Highcroft Racing fan.
David
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