Le Mans Series - SilverstoneMarkus finished 9th in LMGT2 class in the final race of the Le Mans Series. He shared the familiar JWA-run Martini-coloured Porsche 997 GT3-RSR with Paul Daniels and a new-comer Martin Rich. The race was quite clean apart from a broken wheel and a stop n’ go penalty and the trio was able to climb up a few positions, but barely missed a top-8 result. "I really like the Le Mans Series and especially the GT2 class, which is probably the most competitive of them all. We were running an older car and different tyres than the top guys, so challenging the pro-teams was always going to be difficult. The qualifying was a disaster as my first attempt was destroyed after Kaffer lost control of his F430 and I had to back off to avoid him. Then I started one last lap, but the team called me in saying the sector times weren’t looking any better, so it’s wiser to save the tyres. That was the right call, but it was quite strange, because according to the data I was over a second ahead at that point and clearly improving my time quite a lot. We had had some trouble with the timing monitors already in practice, so I should’ve just crossed the line instead of heading for the pits.
I’m quite happy with the race though. We pushed hard and passed a few cars. Paul had a solid stint and some good fights with a few other cars and Martin did very well in his first ever GT2 race. He did get that stop and go penalty, but it is hard to believe that he would have really passed Olivier Panis under yellow flags… After all, the latter was leading the race at that time and lapping about 20s quicker than us in his LMP1. The only other problem we had was when Peter Bamford bumped into me after I had passed him and I had to crawl to the pits with a broken wheel. It was a bit unnecessary and I don’t know what he had in mind, but it’s part of racing and we kept going. It did affect our chances though, because I was just catching up with the two Felbermayr Porsches, but the wheel change dropped us a lap down on them and that’s where we finished. Still, it was quite interesting, because the extra set of tyres I got then for the final stint were much quicker than the ones I had before. I improved our best lap time by 1,6 seconds and was lapping in average almost 2s faster than during my 2 earlier stints. It was of course much too late, but it was good to see that in the end we were quite competitive."
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