CESCS Round 8 - Virginia International Raceway

For various reasons, the last 2 rounds of CESCS has been a bit disappointing for the team so a good performance was needed at VIR to regain the momentum we'd had earlier in the season in all the championships.
Stephan was unavailable for this one so Lewis joined John in #67 with the Marco/Christian partnership continuing in #66.
Marco did a lot of testing and setup work during the week and was fastest of all the runners in most sessions. John also ran well and with Lewis and Christian both having extremely good records at VIR, confidence was high at the start of the race session.
Practice went well for #66 - with Christian and Marco both setting very fast times. Lewis was also very fast with #67 but JOhn was badly off pace - a combination of internet access issues, a 5am start and lack of talent putting him way off the pace he'd been in the earlier session.
In qualifying, Christian did a great job to put #66 on pole. John was slow in #67, only qualifying 9th.
At the start, Christian immediately took the lead and although he was challenged initially, slowly edged away from the challengers and was able to keep the lead throughout his stint, stopping to hand over to Marco at lap 24. John drove steadily and although he lost a couple of places initially to people who hadn't qualified, managed to regain 9th place by the end of his spell and also stopped on lap 24 to hand over to Lewis.


Marco drove well although was hampered slightly by problems with his pedals. He lost the lead halfway into his stint but keep the car in contention, particularly as the main challenger (car 490) stopped 2 laps earlier than Marco did, who stopped on lap 48 to hand back to Christian. meanwhile, Lewis was charging through the field setting lap times similar to the leaders and had moved up to 5th by the time he made his tyre/fuel stop on lap 48.

Shortly after all the pit stops were made, a caution was thrown (for "geese on the track"). This brought the field together although we'd been confident that Christian would have been able to catch and pass 490 as that car would certainly have needed another pit stop or to do some major fuel saving. At the restart, Christian stayed with the 490 car and made a great pass when 490's driver made a small mistake. Despite massive (and probably slightly over aggressive) pressure, Christian managed to retain the lead and took a great win for the team, our 1st in the Mustang in CESCS after a couple of near misses.

Lewis started 5th and had a great battle with Kevin Ford, eventually getting by him. He then quickly caught the 3rd placed car and took 3rd place after the 049 car went off track and made contact with Lewis as he came back on track. Lewis was damaged but held onto 3rd for a double podium for the team - a truly awesome result.

The results mean that Marco retakes the driver championship lead and #66 moves to within 4 points of the team championship leaders. In the Mr Clean standings, Marco extends his lead and JOhn moves into 2nd place. Christian move into the top 5 in these standings as well.