CESCS Round 6 - Road America

After a poor result at Lime Rock, the team was looking to bounce back at Road America.

The opening stages of the race went fairly well for both cars, with Christian and John both doing solid jobs during their 1st stints. What became clear during this stage of the race was that fuel economy was likely to play a bit part in the outcome of the race and both Christian and John got to the 1/3 point of the race before stopping - critical if we were to make the end with only 2 fuel stops.

Marco and Stephan continued in the same way, holding good positions while still keeping fuel economy in mind.

At the 3rd and final stop, Stephan continued in #67 but team manager John King made the call to put Christian back in the #66 as Christian is more experienced at fuel saving and the car was fairly marginal on fuel.

The strategy looked like it was going to pay off - with Christian able to get the fuel to positive levels and still stay in touch the the cars in front (most of who were in serious fuel problems). But, the strategy and the race was destroyed by a needless caution with 25 mins to go. The cars ended up 6th and 7th, with #66 far further down the field than it deserved to be.

Full results here

22/8/2015 - BES Week 8 at Mosport

For the 5th week out of 8, BAM emerged victorious from the 9:00am GMT timeslot with all 4 cars finishing in the top 10 of the race. However, this week's victory was a 1st win in BES for the #67 BMW, driven superbly by Lewis Cugaly who was in a class of his own throughout the race and only a late incident with a back marker prevented Lewis from lapping the entire field.

The #66 Ford GT3 was 3rd, mostly driven by Christian Challiner who maintained his very consistent finishing in the races, with #69 and #68 both producing great recovery drives after early race problems.

Full results here

VLN Round 6 - 4 Hours of Spa 22nd Aug 2015

This was the final round of the 2nd season of VLN and the team was determined to do well, especially after the win in the previous round at Road America.

Qualifying looked promised - with Marco and Christian putting the cars onto 2nd & 3rd on the grid in the Mustang class. The race was strangely uneventful with both cars running in the top 3 all race, with the positions varying depending on the pit stop cycle but Marco and Stephan eventually brought the #68 car home 2nd behind SRN Motorsport with Christian & Clark following in 3rd.

Full results here

DGFX Round 8 - Road America

With the recent increase of BAM members, we increased the entries to 2 BMWs for this race and continued to run one BMW and 1 C Spec as "development/fun" cars and will try to have 1 competitive car in each class.
For the BMW's one of BAM's top pairs - Lewis and Christian were nominated although Christian has hardly touched the BMW this season so we were keeping expectations low. Lewis did a great job in qualifying, putting the car 4th on the GT3 grid as the fastest BMW.
In the early stages of the race, he ran very strongly and get the car up to 3rd in the GT3's but was forced into a spin by an impatient HPD and lost about 20 seconds. He recovered well to hand the car over to Christian in 4th place and Christian drove steadily to keep the car in that position, moving up one place when one of the cars ahead crashed. Lewis pushed very hard during the final hour setting the fastest lap of the GT3's in the process but couldn't catch the cars ahead and had to settle for a very good 3rd place.
The #67 car, driven by Matt R, Josh and Ernie, finished a solid 7th despite a few hiccups with Matt making a very good debut for the team.
In the C Specs, Juha and Fokke were always near the front and lead for around half the race although they were on a slightly different pit stop strategy to their main rivals. After the final stops were completed (we thought!) Juha had a 50 sec lead and although we had a late scare when we realised that Juha needed a little bit more fuel, he brought the #68 car home fora great win, the 3rd for the car in the series and a 1st win for Fokke for the team.
In the #69, the race was spoilt by and impatient HPD driver (see the pattern?) when Denny was hit entering the pits. The car was badly damaged but Brandon did a great job to drag the car home.

Full results here

SEK Rnd 8 - Monza 2h 45m Endurance

The team headed for Monza with a slightly different line-up to most of the races this season:

#66 was driven by Christian and Lewis and they had a really good race. Christian was involved in an incident early in the race and dropped to the end of the field but a great recovery drive by both of them saw the car in 2nd place in a latter stages. Lewis had a MAJOR moment on the last lap (see 3:07 on the coverage below) and dropped to 3rd but it was still a really great run.

#67 was driven by John and Craig. They had a solid run and were up to 12th in the fairly uncompetitive BMW at one stage but a mistake by John late in the race saw them drop to 14th.

#68, driven by Joseph and Matt N, was involved in a start line incident and immediately lost a lap. A good drive by both thereafter saw them recover to 15th.

#69 with Oliver and Gary on-board was another BMW struggling for straight-line pace. A steady drive to 15th was about the best we could have expected.

Full results here