What an event for Jaguar!
After getting the race schedule a couple of days before traveling, we saw that there were no group 4 races in there. We were immediately disappointed because 90% of Jaguars good results across all regions came from the Gr4 races.
We started practicing on the rain and we noticed that the MR cars plus Mercedes had a big gap for the rest of the cars, so we basically were fighting for P6 in qualy. Kenny was the driver chosen for that and got P7, which was pretty good.
For the race, he started and was conservative in the beginning which cost him some positions. He then was blocked behind a big group of FR cars, then we made the call to pit earlier to give
@Jomas free air. He got the car on lap 5 and raced til lap 10, on great pace. Then it was my time to drive the last 7 laps. I had free air as well and overtook the Toyota to finish 7th in the end, basically second on our class.
For Spa it was a bit trick. We realized that the hard tyres were horrible, so we knew we had to ditch it as quickly as possible. Since there's no Spa in the game, we had no idea which driver would use the hards, someone would have to sacrifice himself for the team and do only 1 lap. Nobody really wants to go to these events and race 1 out of 17 laps. I offered myself to do it, but having in mind that in the possibility of the same circumstances happening again, one of the other 2 drivers would have to do it if there was no clarity on pace of the drivers (I also hope PD brings back the minimum number of laps for each driver to do, that fixes this issue).
So we started 7th on hards with me driving. I got overtook by the Toyota and Chevy on mediums but critically managed to avoid the Peugeot spinning on Eau Rouge. I pitted on the end of lap 1 to ditch the hards and we came back with
@Jomas on the wheel with mediums and still in 8th after the stop. He had free air and did a great job with a constant fast pace. He then pitted in the end of lap 8 and Kenny put softs to race til the end. He also did really well to make the tyres work for 9 laps and even challenged the Porsche for P3. In the end we finished P4 overall, which was an absolutely amazing result, having in mind that we didn't even used our, by far, best car.
I'm really happy with our team performance and strategies. We keep approaching a podium finish that would be incredible.
