2015 Season Review - CESCS

The CESCS series is a long establish league on iRacing that mirrors, as closely as possible, the real life series. We entered 2 cars, one focussed on Marco Abbate in a bid to win the drivers championship and a back-up car to help with setups and strategy. Marco was initially partnered by Lewis Cugaly but with Lewis starting to have connection and hardware issues, John King stepped in for a couple of rounds until Christian Challiner took over permanently, with John moving to the 2nd car.

We started the season well, with a great 2nd place at Daytona by Marco/Lewis, a brilliant 3rd at Sebring with Marco driving solo and another 2nd at Laguna with Lewis back in the car with Marco. Laguna provided the lowlight of the season with Marco (very unfairly) penalised for unavoidable contact with an MX-5. The penalty was 10 championship points in the drivers championship and although it turned out to be insignificant, it did make the last 2 rounds more tense than they could have been.

Round 4 was at Watkins and with Lewis again having problems, John stepped into the #66 with Marco. Their race was "interesting" - John was spun at T1, Lap 1 by 49 Motorsports but recovered to hand over to Marco in 5th. Marco then had a slightly slow stop during a caution period and lost positions but then drove a storming race to get the car back to 5th.

The halfway point of the series was Mosport with John again partnering Marco and Christian in #67 with Stephan. Stephan and John started and both drove well to hand over to the faster drivers in good positions. At one stage it looked like the cars could finish 1-2 but Marco was penalised for speeding in the pits (but recovered to finish 4th) and we made a strategy call to not change tyres on #67. It probably wasn't the right move but Christian drove fantastically to keep the car 2nd.

For round 6 at Lime Rock, Lewis was back but with his connection problems still lurking, Christian drove with Marco in #66 and Lewis partnered Stephan in #67. The strategy looked perfect as Christian took pole and lead for most of the 1st stint. Marco was running well but spun and damaged the car at Lime Rocks imfamous hill. #67 also run fast (Lewis setting the fastest lap of the race) but also got damaged. 8th for #67 and 11th for #66 wasn't a reflection of our pace and was easily the worst result for the team during the season.

Round 7 at Road America was spoilt by an unnecessary caution thrown by the stewards. #66, again driven by Marco and Christian, were in a very strong strategic position but their fuel advantage was given up at the caution. Their 6th place again didn't reflect their pace. Stephan and John finished a solid 7th.

The team bounced back very strongly at VIR with Marco and Christian taking a great win. #67, driven by Lewis and John (Stephan wasn't available) finished 3rd and only a weird connection problem for John that caused him to blink and drive slowly to ensure he didn't crash prevented them from making it a 1-2.

COTA was another strong performance by Christian and Marco but Christian had a disconnect during his stint and they lost a lot of time while the car towed and Marco jumped back in. 4th place was a great recovery. In #67, John drove with the Mr Clean standings in mind so gave Stephan a difficult job to make up ground but he did manage to drag the car up to 6th.

Christian sweeps by Todd Honczarenko as Todd pits for fuel
as the white flag comes out

The final race at Road Atlanta was tense for the team. Marco led the drivers championship but only by a small margin and we were a few points behind Torque Chicken and their guest stars in the team standings. The race turned out to be a strategic rerun of Road America but this time a caution didn't save the other teams and with other cars slowing to save fuel or having to make a last minute splash & Dash, Christian retook the lead he'd given up to save fuel earlier in the stint with 2 laps to go and took another great win for #66 and revenge for the Road America result.

The results were enough to seal the drivers (and rookie) championship for Marco. We narrowly failed to overtook Torque Chicken in the team standings. John, Marco and Christian made it a clean sweep for BAM in the Mr Clean standings.